3

THE WORD OF THE BUDDHA

When Zurkharwa Lodrö Gyelpo quipped that “in this snowy land of Tibet, as soon as three or more get together … they discuss it,” his levity belied the gravity of the matter at hand.¹ The discussion to which he refers is something he cared about greatly. Not only did he codify the most radical stance of all in the heated debate about the authorship of the Four Treatises (in which many more than three participated); he was also exceptionally bold in saying what no one else dared to venture.

The Desi’s nemesis and medical predecessor by over a century, Zurkharwa picked up on a baldly empiricist reading of certain incommensurabilities in the root medical text that had been brewing in medical intellectual circles for centuries. But Zurkharwa’s rendition worked out the implications with rhetorical finesse, ending up with a historicist account of epistemic authority that was unprecedented in scope or hermeneutical precision. More than the proposals of the Navya “innovative traditionalists” in the same centuries, of whom Yigal Bronner writes, the kinds of issues that were being raised in the medical Buddha Word debate, and which Zurkharwa brought to a head, had the potential to recast the entire edifice of canonical status and the grounds of truth claims widely assumed across Tibetan scholastic worlds.²

The work at the heart of the matter had a status on a par with canonical Buddhist scripture, and challenges to its authority were momentous. Clearly compiled in twelfth-century Tibet, the Four Treatises is cast as the “Word of the Buddha” (Skt. buddhavacana), and borrows key genre features that point to that status. Such a move is not new in itself; many apocryphal works in Tibetan Buddhism were equipped with a Sanskrit title and couched as a sermon delivered by the Buddha.3 Even Chinese astrological calculation was given a Buddhist pedigree at a certain point in Tibet.⁴ But what draws our attention to this gesture in the case of the Four Treaties is its reception, the way that its Buddhist and Indic provenance was refuted by some of the Tibetan intelligentsia in overtly historicist terms, and at a level of specificity rarely found in Indic or Tibetan Buddhist writing.⁵ This is notably different from the debates around the Tibetan Buddhist Treasure tradition, to which the Four Treatises apologists were in some respects indebted. The Treasures were defended in metaphysical terms that blurred all significance of conventional time and place, in order to protect the ultimate author function of the Buddha. In striking contrast, medical commentators of Zurkharwa’s ilk were comfortable with dismantling the Buddha’s authorship on empirical grounds. And even more unusual for the Tibetan cultural sphere, such criticism did not dent the prestige or value of the work.

The medical Buddha Word debate was introduced to Western scholarship by Samten Karmay more than twenty years ago.⁶ Reviewing the documents that Karmay surveyed, along with certain key sources that have come to light more recently, shows how the argument came to entail a reckoning of scriptural authority with empirical evidence. In this way, akin to the history of the “radical” wing of the European enlightenment, the critical turn in Four Treatises scholarship made for a felicitous rapprochement, whereby key theological concerns were respected even though a rift between science and religion had clearly been suggested.⁷ Even if such a rift never developed to an order of magnitude anywhere near that in the West, the fact that it was on the table at all marks an exceptional moment in Tibetan intellectual history.

Zurkharwa played the leading role in this history. In doing so, he has to have been one of the deftest debaters in all of Tibetan polemics. He both delivered the coup de grace by laying out the true origins of the Four Treatises and then quickly domesticated those origins in Buddhist ethical terms. In effect, he forged a way to have a text of great value that need not be dubbed sacred scripture (hard as that might be for a Tibetan audience, as Zurkharwa noted acerbically) or violate historical verities.

In many ways my own historiography follows Zurkharwa’s lead, and often agrees with it. This is not only because of being able to relate to him as someone who takes history seriously and can mobilize a probative approach toward authorship claims and disparate evidence. Nor is it just in admiration of the ways he could draw upon Buddhist resources in innovative ways to serve his scientistic aims. I also appreciate his effort to articulate enduring moral values for the Buddhist world in which he lived. He has something to offer me as a scholar of religion. This and the following two chapters look at how Zurkharwa showed a way to honor the realities of religion, including its impact on bodily experience, without losing sight of another, scientific perspective that remains committed to empirical accountability and a critical assessment of how religious practice works.

The last chapter began to broach the episteme of Tibetan medicine through the lens of Desi Sangyé Gyatso’s writings. This extended to its impact on the larger intellectual climate in the seventeenth-century capital, including the self-conception of the newly centralized government of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The fact that medicine created a separate history and literary canon for itself, not to mention a separate institutional base, suggested a certain distance between medicine and the epistemic grounds of Buddhist knowledge and authority in Tibet. In this and the following chapter, I look at a few debates in which such issues come to the fore. This requires going back into the history of medicine in Tibet and poring systematically through the early documents, in order to appreciate subtle shifts and their growing implications. This will culminate in the work of Zurkharwa, and his sometimes straw-dog, sometimes real interlocutors, quintessentially represented by Jangpa Tashi Pelzang.

Chapter 2 already studied the Desi’s account of Zurkharwa’s life, which, despite the scathing rhetoric, captures most of the available historical information. One of the Desi’s main sources was the opening pages of Zurkharwa’s own responses to the medical questions he had posted in Lhasa early in his career. In an essay he entitled Old Man’s Testament, Zurkharwa begins with a review of his education. There is nothing in the way of biographical information beyond what is included in the Desi’s sketch. But what is notable in Old Man’s Testament is the way Zurkharwa looks back on his life, specifically his education and his colleagues, and his rhetorical style in representing it.

These pages readily demonstrate how much of the arresting irreverence in the Desi’s writings was already alive and well a century and a half earlier. Zurkharwa may recount his own accomplishments with more sympathy than the Desi was willing to muster, but he is even more caustic than his haughty successor with respect to his own colleagues. He rails in detail about each of those who could not even understand his questions, let alone produce a decent response. Indeed, much of what he receives is the “vomit of conceit, and does little more than to make dogs happy.”8 He goes on and on like this. He directly addresses one of his responders, Nangso Dönyö, as “friend,” telling him that his answers are good, better than the rest, and yet he has displayed no sign that he understood the questions. One of his best colleagues, the great scholar Kyempa Tsewang, gets through to Zurkharwa that the latter’s earlier commentary on his own questions was itself hard to understand. Thus Zurkharwa is gradually convinced to write his own response.⁹

Much else of what we know of Zurkharwa’s approach to medical learning anticipates that of the Desi too. Zurkharwa studied prodigiously in all of the medical traditions, gathering information eclectically for his own edification. He may have been the first of the medical scholars to post challenging questions on a public pillar in Lhasa, helping to create the agonistic attitude in learned medical circles upon which the Desi built his own career. He did his own antiquarian research, probing the same old medical histories that the Desi would later analyze. He produced the first blockprint of the Four Treatises, which the Desi would later endeavor to correct; although he had difficulty garnering patronage, that sponsorship illustrates the larger dependence of medical learning on power that would become so central by the Desi’s time, in patterns closely similar to the patronage of Buddhist scholarship. Zurkharwa’s life corresponds to the heyday of the Tsangpa strongmen Tseten Dorjé and his son Karma Tensung Wangpo, two generations before the final defeat of Karma Tenkyong Wangpo by the troops of the Fifth Dalai Lama. His projects were underwritten by a variety of powerful supporters, and he was closely aligned with the Karma Kagyü throughout his life. His connection with the waning Rinpung warlords hardly match the spectacular position that the Desi would achieve, but the overall picture exemplifies the conditions for many Jang and Zur luminaries of the period.

Zurkharwa’s two seminal works on medicine, his Ancestors’ Advice commentary on the Four Treatises and his history of Tibetan medicine, had enormous influence on Tibetan medicine’s story of itself and its reading of the Four Treatises, not the least of which is to be seen in the Desi’s wholesale appropriation of many passages in his own work. Their effects are still being felt in contemporary scholarship, inside Tibet today as well as further afield.¹⁰ I will be drawing on them extensively in the next three chapters, following Zurkharwa in both his impertinent assessments of wrong ideas and his delicate negotiation of some thorny issues at the crossroads between medical and Buddhist traditions of knowledge.

Whereas the Desi singled out Zurkharwa for special invective, Zurkharwa’s vociferous arguments often light on Jangpa Tashi Pelzang, who flourished in the second half of the fifteenth century, about eighty years prior to Zurkharwa’s own career.11 Justifiably or not, Zurkharwa used the Jangpa exegete’s work to epitomize an approach to medical history and theory against which Zurkharwa defined himself in contrast. His frustration with Tashi Pelzang is most explicit in debates about pulse diagnostics, to be studied in the following chapters. But he critically addresses many of the points raised in Tashi Pelzang’s own milestone essay on the Buddha Word issue too.

Tashi Pelzang’s family line in the north of Dokam was traced by the Desi back to imperial times. He was the son of the outstanding scholar Mi Nyima Tongden, who was in turn a disciple of the Jangpa school’s founder, Namgyel Drakzang. All three were closely related to the Jangpa nobility of Northern Latö, powerful rulers in the fifteenth century. Tashi Pelzang himself was involved with the Treasure-based lineage of Tibetan medicine.¹² Like Zurkharwa in the Zur lineage, Tashi Pelzang represented a brilliant younger generation that succeeded a learned and venerable founder of a school. The Desi speculates that Zurkharwa likely received his own Jangpa transmissions from a lineage stemming from Tashi Pelzang.¹³ Regarding the debate about pulse and gender, Tashi Pelzang was far more subtle, innovative, and empirically grounded than Zurkharwa allows. Once again, Zurkharwa anticipates the moves of the Desi against himself, pillorying Tashi Pelzang on a trumpedup charge while appropriating his ideas. But elsewhere, and certainly on the issue examined in this chapter, Tashi Pelzang was extremely conservative. This is a side of Treasure tradition not often recognized.¹⁴ Tashi Pelzang strained to maintain the Indic origins of the Four Treatises and what he took to be the literal meanings of the authoritative texts, sometimes at the expense of all common sense.

The debate on the Buddha Word issue that Zurkharwa represents between himself and such predecessors serves well to introduce the direction in which figures like him—and in the end, the Desi too—were leading Tibetan medicine as it came into its own. But the path along which the argument proceeds is not always direct. Authors go out on a limb and then immediately retreat and cover their tracks … and then venture back out again. Statements making almost the exact same point wind up, by virtue of very tiny shifts, at two diametrical ends of an argument. It is surprising how often these shifts occur, and how many times positions change.

THE FOUR TREATISES AS THE WORD OF THE BUDDHA

Whatever else one might want to say about the Buddha Word debate, it must first be noticed that the Four Treatises itself takes steps to insert itself into a Buddhist canonical context. In this it is to be distinguished from its Ayurvedic counterparts—and all other known full-service medical works in Asia—by framing itself as a teaching of the Medicine Buddha. While the Indic medical classics ultimately attribute Ayurvedic knowledge to deities like Brahmā and Indra, the texts themselves are clearly authored by humans.15 No Indic or Chinese work dedicated to a comprehensive study of medicine presents itself as a teaching of the Buddha.¹⁶

There is at least one full-fledged medical text—covering a full range of anatomy, physiology, diagnostics, pharmacology, and therapeutics—that was available in Tibet at the time the Four Treatises was composed and is attributed to a Buddhist deity.¹⁷ This is Sman dpyad zla ba’i rgyal po (a.k.a. Somarāja), which probably dates from the Yarlung period.¹⁸ It presents itself as a teaching by Mañjuśrī delivered on Wutai Shan. But its scriptural genre apparatus is nowhere near as intricately developed as it is in the Four Treatises. The other early Tibetan medical works that are available, such as Bi ji’i po ti kha ser, offer prostrations and praise for a deity in their opening lines, but are presented as written by humans.¹⁹ Even the Four Treatises’ author’s own earlier medical writings lack the genre-making frame of a Buddhist scripture.²⁰ Clearly the Four Treatises represents a new and deliberate effort to read as a teaching of the Buddha—on the part of its author or the disciples responsible for its initial propagation.²¹ It bespeaks an intention to participate in a larger Tibetan literary milieu, that of the revered and successful Buddhist canonical scriptures. The Four Treatises jumped genres, as it were, in this joining other apocryphal works with high ambition, such as the Tibetan Treasure texts, which also framed themselves as the Word of the Buddha. They thereby gained legitimacy and authority. Zurkharwa himself will make this point about the Four Treatises.

The Four Treatises’ appropriation of scriptural genre conventions starts directly after its initial lines of homage with the formulaic phrase, “Thus have I heard at one time.” Although this line was tampered with in later versions, our earliest witnesses show the text opening its teachings in the classic and widely recognizable Buddhist revelatory fashion.22 Then it moves directly into a point-for-point appropriation of what Tibetan scholars call the “five excellences.” These are standard to the basic setting (gleng gzhi) of a work representing Buddha Word: place, teacher, time, audience, and teaching. Their excellence presages the excellence of the work itself.

The five excellences in the Four Treatises’ basic setting begin with the place. The opening pages provide an unusually detailed description of where the teachings are occurring.²³ It is a palace in Tanaduk, a city of medicine. Tanaduk is adorned with wonderful medicinal plants and substances from the four mountains that are arrayed around its four cardinal directions. The Medicine Buddha, Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabha, who is residing there is mentioned several pages later. He is sitting on a throne in the palace, surrounded by his retinue. Then he enters deep meditative absorption. A light emerges from his heart. After it purifies the illnesses of all beings, it emanates the manifested teacher Sage Intelligent Gnosis, who hovers in the sky and speaks to the other sages who are present, exhorting them to study medicine for the benefit of all. Then the Buddha emanates healing lights from his tongue, and a manifestation of his speech, Sage Mind-Born, appears. Mind-Born beseeches Intelligent Gnosis for those medical teachings. And so Intelligent Gnosis starts to teach. As a sign of how well this basic setting has been integrated into the work, all 156 chapters of the Four Treatises open and close by reminding us of this scene, and cast the entire teaching as a dialogue between the master, Sage Intelligent Gnosis, and his interlocutor, Sage Mind-Born.

These familiar signs of a Buddhist canonical text decidedly place the work in the category of Buddha Word. Although some early medical scholars were concerned about this, there is nothing unusual about its being taught by a buddha other than Śākyamuni, i.e., the Medicine Buddha. Nor is it odd for him to manifest or empower someone else to actually preach the teaching: the same pattern can be observed in many Buddhist canonical sūtras and tantras. And as for the rest of the five excellences, there is long precedent in the canon for Buddha Word to have been preached in many places, for many audiences, at many times, and with special contents tailored for those circumstances. Most of all, the very rehearsal of the excellences itself, setting the stage in the familiar way, along with other common sūtraic elements such as the Buddha entering meditation and emanating light rays, all would have given a clear signal to readers that the Four Treatises is indeed Buddha Word.

That said, discrepancies in the work’s own portrayal of this primal scene are readily evident. Quite revealing is the Four Treatises’ audience. It consists of four groups, including not only “insiders,” i.e., Buddhists,24 a common Tibetan rubric that here refers to the bodhisattvas Mañjuṡrī, Avalokiteśvara, and Vajrapāṇi; Ānanda, the famous disciple who recited all of the Buddha’s teachings after his death; and Jivaka, the Buddha’s physician. The other three groups are the gods, sages, and tīrthikas (non-Buddhist Indian teachers). Some of the sages (Skt. ṛṣi) are central figures of mainstream Ayurvedic tradition, such as Ātreya and Agniveśa. The gods include Brahmā and others, also cited in Ayurvedic works. Although it is common for Buddhist canonical works to have diverse audiences, this one seems tailored specifically to reference the broad Indic medical tradition upon which the Four Treatises actually draws.

A second statement near the end of the Four Treatises goes even further. This time, a crack in the entire mythic edifice appears when reference is made to historical, geopolitical entities. It is an odd passage, coming at the end of the penultimate chapter and immediately following a survey of various therapies. Suddenly the frame story is invoked again, and Mind-Born asks the work’s expounder whether there is anything in medical science that is not included in the Four Treatises. The answer is a list of medical teachings that manifestations of the Buddha have taught for the benefit of beings in varying contexts and with varying needs. In India they have taught the use of medicines; in China, moxibustion and purgatives; in Dölpo, bloodletting; in Tibet, pulse and urine diagnostics; for the gods, the text Gso dpyad ’bum pa; for the sages, the Caraka in eight sections; for the tīrthikas, the Black Īśvara Tantra; and for the insiders—i.e., Buddhists—teachings related to the three bodhisattva protectors.²⁵ All of these teachings are included in the Four Treatises, the text goes on to aver; there is no other medical knowledge that is not included here.²⁶

Setting aside the documentary value of this overview of medicine—not to mention the hubris in making the Buddha the ultimate author of the Caraka and teacher of Chinese medicine—the text seems to be communicating something about the origins of its own contents. The statement would seem to represent an admission of its disparate sources. These extend not only into Buddhist scriptural passages but also the South Asian mythological world of gods, tīrthikas, and sages, as well as across specific areas in the rest of Asia, even mentioning the Himalayan region of Dölpo for some reason. The passage readily appropriates the long-standing Buddhist hermeneutic of the Buddha’s multivalent skillful means in order to make the work ultimately the Buddha’s teaching, but at the same time to account for the diversity of knowledge systems upon which its author drew.

In this book I am following Zurkharwa and like-minded Tibetan commentators in assuming that the Four Treatises was indeed compiled from a variety of medical traditions, and composed, originally in the Tibetan language, by Yutok Yönten Gönpo (“the Younger”) and his circle in the twelfth century. As evidence that there was some hesitation in locating the Four Treatises entirely within the literary universe of Buddhist scripture, this late passage in the work indicates that someone felt compelled to own up to the role of Ayurvedic and other sources of medical knowledge outside of the Buddha’s dispensation as well.

Despite these signs of ambivalence—and not to mention other telltale signs of the work’s true provenance, which Zurkharwa’s predecessors will dryly point out—there was widespread acceptance of the work’s own claims. Tibetan Buddhists, at least in the Old School to which many of the early propagators and commentators on the Four Treatises belonged, were used to issues around apocryphal scriptures. The Four Treatises partook in many of the strategies of the Old School’s Treasure tradition, which was just getting under way during this period and also produced native Tibetan works that were cast as Buddha Word and purported to be translations from Indic texts. And that is quite apart from the use of the Treasure mode to solve some of the work’s transmission problems, which were noticed as soon as it appeared.27

EARLY RECEPTION

Despite the Four Treatises’ own devices in casting itself as Buddha Word, the claim still needed bolstering. One sure sign of an ongoing defensiveness is found in the early historical account called Soaring Garuda, probably written by a disciple of Yutok Yönten Gönpo.²⁸ In the last chapter, we saw this early example of medical historiography work singled out by the Desi for its virtues. In fact the entire work is dedicated to establishing the Four Treatises as Buddha Word—which no doubt explains both the Desi’s approval and Zurkharwa’s withering critique of it.²⁹

The polemical intent of Soaring Garuda is clear enough in its closing statement, where it refers to itself as a response to objections and as a means to reject criticisms (rtsod zlog), a genre term repeated in later apologies. Soaring Garuda provides evidence that the debate was already in progress close to the time of the Four Treatises’ creation. Everything it discusses, from the nature of the five sciences to the Buddhist scriptures that touch on medical topics, sets the stage for placing the Four Treatises within the category of the Buddha’s teachings. It also provides a typology of three kinds of Buddha Word: that which was “actually spoken” by the mouth of the Buddha; that which has the express “blessing” or inspiration of the Buddha; and that which was preached by someone else who had the “permission” of the Buddha to utter something that would serve as Buddha Word.30 Drawing on a long tradition in Buddhist scriptural history whereby types of Buddha-inspired speech (Skt. pratibhāna) pronounced by figures other than the Buddha himself were still presented as Buddha Word, this tripartite scheme would be invoked repeatedly in the coming centuries.³¹ Soaring Garuda identifies the Four Treatises as the second kind of Word, that which has the Buddha’s blessing, on the logic that the Medicine Buddha entered meditation and then created Intelligent Gnosis and his interlocutor Mind-Born for the purposes of delivering the teaching.³² Otherwise, Soaring Garuda avers, since Intelligent Gnosis is a manifestation, or emanation (sprul pa; Skt. nirmāṇa), of the Buddha, the Four Treatises could go into the category of that “actually spoken” by the Buddha. It also goes out of its way to deny that the Four Treatises is instead a śāstra, a far more general category that in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism denotes a composition by a teacher other than the Buddha.³³ Apparently someone else had already contended that this was what the Four Treatises really was. Soaring Garuda evinces anxiety about such a claim.

While this early attempt to reject criticism argues from the perspective of the original preaching scene, another work contemporaneous to Soaring Garuda takes up the Four Treatises’ propagation in Tibet. This is the Crucial Lineage Biography, also produced by the generation immediately succeeding Yutok, most likely his chief disciple, Sumtön Yeshe Zung, and his student Zhönnu Yeshé.³⁴ It forms a pair with Soaring Garuda, in a manner similar to the legitimating apparatus of the Buddhist Treasure tradition. Soaring Garuda is like an “origin account” in that it tells the mythic circumstances of a work’s original preaching. The Crucial Lineage Biography, in contrast, works like a “revelation account,” relating the events by which the work came to be transmitted in the world of humans.³⁵ This is one more example of medical literature mirroring patterns being established in the Buddhist Treasure literature during the same period.

The Crucial Lineage Biography simply assumes that the Four Treatises is a teaching of the Buddha Bhaiṣajyaguru, although the details are interesting. It specifies that the medical city Tanaduk, in which the original Four Treatises teaching took place, is in Oḍḍiyāna, the famous land to the southwest of Tibet that is closely associated with Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan tantric Buddhism and the principal teacher of the Treasures. Again, the introduction of Oḍḍiyāna strongly suggests Old School lore. But most telling is the wholesale adaptation of Treasure tradition in the story that is supplied about how the Four Treatises was transmitted after its original preaching. The text was passed down to a variety of Indian figures, through two principal lineages: one from Ātreya, the other from Jīvaka (the physician to the Buddha in many Buddhist sources). The latter’s line eventually extended to Candranandana, the Indian author of the principal commentary to the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā. Finally, we get the story of the Four Treatises’ transmission in Tibet as a Treasure text; this would be repeated many times in medical historiography. The work was obtained by the eighth-century Tibetan master Vairocana (well known more generally to the Treasure tradition), who brought it to the Tibetan king Tri Songdetsen. The latter hid it in a pillar at the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Samyé. After three days for the gods of the desire realm (very long in human time),36 the work was rediscovered as a Treasure by Drapa Ngönshé (a historical figure from the eleventh century) and soon passed down to Yutok Yönten Gönpo.

A key to what else the Crucial Lineage Biography is up to comes next. It states that Yutok judiciously passed the Four Treatises to a single disciple, the first-person narrator of most of the Crucial Lineage Biography, [Sumtön] Yeshé Zung.³⁷ There are repeated injunctions not to share the Four Treatises with others, and repeated reference to the fame that will be attained by those who possess it. The self-serving agenda is pretty thinly disguised. Yeshé Zung in turn passed it down to his disciple Zhönnu Yeshé, who also speaks in the first person and whose name appears again in the colophon to the work.³⁸ A premier concern of both authorial voices is to legitimate themselves as the bona fide inheritors of the Four Treatises, to the exclusion of others. Yeshé Zung speaks in detail of his own education and practice and then his own writing and note-taking. He even equates his teacher, Yutok, with the very expositor of the Four Treatises, Sage Intelligent Gnosis. And then he equates himself with the Four Treatises’ interlocutor, Sage Mind-Born. But his rhetoric is interesting: he actually only says that Yutok Gönpo is like Intelligent Gnosis, and that he himself is Mind-Born, he thinks.³⁹ There is a bit of hesitancy about the apotheosis the author is pursuing for himself and his teacher.

Two things to note from this short but pithy work: first, it seems to be our earliest source that provides a Treasure narrative for the Four Treatises’ transmission in Tibet. Importantly, Treasure transmission allows a historical hand (actually two—the discoverer, Drapa Ngönshé, and then the putative codifier, Yutok) in the work’s formation while still making the original author the Medicine Buddha, and the work itself an Indic composition that had to be translated into Tibetan. If there is anything to my speculation that the formulators of the Four Treatises were anxious about the fiction they had created regarding its authorship, they might have assuaged their unease by acknowledging part of the fact of the matter while still preserving the prestige and authority of Buddhist and Indic origins. In addition, the Treasure narrative handily allows the Four Treatises to appear publicly in the Tibetan world relatively close to the time that it actually did, in the twelfth century. Historical common sense is not violated. Indeed, as Zurkharwa complains later, if the Four Treatises came to Tibet from India during the imperial period, why is there no evidence of its presence in Tibet before Yutok? A good start in response would be that the text was in hiding at Samyé. But more on this later.

The second noteworthy realization from reading the Crucial Lineage Biography is that to lift up the Four Treatises as originally the teaching of the Buddha would also lift up the Crucial Lineage Biography’s narrators, Yeshé Zung and his disciple, twelfth- to thirteenth-century medical practitioners who seem bent upon constituting an exclusive “lineage of one.” This may have a lot to do with the original casting of the Four Treatises as Buddha Word in the first place. The Crucial Lineage Biography bears striking witness to the means by which the early possessors of this medical treatise managed to create a buzz around it (in contrast to other medical treatises in circulation in Tibet at the time, which had no such enlightened frame story) while still keeping the text to themselves. The Crucial Lineage Biography is a reminder that Tibetan medicine was a highly competitive field.

One more important early account also mentions the origin of the Four Treatises, but complicates the picture in a surprising way. This is the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story.40 It is part of the Heart Sphere of Yutok cycle, the set of tantric teachings associated with Yutok’s legacy mentioned in the previous chapter. The cycle itself is closely aligned with other Old School healing practices, and its rituals are not of immediate concern here.⁴¹ However, the work that presents the “story” of the cycle is very pertinent.

The Heart Sphere of Yutok Story has some relation to the Crucial Lineage Biography. It is not really much about the Heart Sphere of Yutok as such, but rather focuses on Yutok Yönten Gönpo’s teachings and life. It too is bent on bolstering its author, the same Sumtön Yeshé Zung, as the sole inheritor of the Four Treatises.42 Sumtön speaks frequently in the first person, naming himself explicitly. Also like the Crucial Lineage, the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story incorporates some possibly genuine autobiographical material from Yutok’s own hand.⁴³ But what is most important about this work, and would be duly noted by the sharpest of the later medical commentators, is the way that Yutok is glorified as an exalted conveyor of Buddhist teachings, in statements cast in both the first and third person. Critically, he is even on occasion referred to as a “manifestation.”⁴⁴ The use of this ambiguous epithet here probably just reflects the growing tendency in Tibet to recognize great teachers as manifestations of the Buddha. Indeed, the text also makes it clear that despite his high accomplishments Yutok was not actually a buddha as such.⁴⁵ The Desi nonetheless would later invoke this early epithet to bolster his contention that the Four Treatises is really the Word of the Buddha, playing on the slippage that the preacher of the work, Intelligent Gnosis, was himself pointedly called a manifestation of the Buddha. But a century before the Desi, Zurkharwa already picked out this same statement in the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story precisely to disaggregate such an elevation of Yutok’s virtues from any apotheosis as a buddha. In this Zurkharwa was a more faithful reader of the early document, given that its own narrative already seems largely to assent to Yutok’s human authorship of the Four Treatises. Indeed—and this is very significant—in the midst of giving a long account of Yutok’s career, a statement put in the mouth of Yutok himself explicitly uses the verb “composed” (brtsams) to describe what Yutok did with respect to the creation of the Four Treatises.

That telling verb is astounding. It is cited pointedly by Zurkharwa and the others who questioned the Four Treatises’ Buddha Word status. And in the same breath, the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story also describes the Four Treatises as a medical śāstra.46 It characterizes Yutok’s authority to compose the work as based on the permission granted to him by the yidam, or “tutelary” deities. “Permission” names one of the three kinds of Buddha Word, but it does not seem that the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story is using the word here to signify that. Far more revealing is the fact that it refers several times to the Four Treatises as a śāstra, a very loaded term that precisely contrasts with Buddha Word.⁴⁷ Indeed, the very same key sentence that uses the verb “compose” and calls the work a śāstra glosses the Four Treatises further as “having not even the slightest difference from the blessings of the Secret Mantra unsurpassable tantras.”⁴⁸ The fact that this needs to be said already indicates that the work is actually not one of those tantras, i.e., Buddha Word as such.

The Heart Sphere of Yutok Story is nonetheless overflowing in its praise for Yutok. Yutok attains the two kinds of powers; then, based on the prophecy and permission that he receives from the deities, he composes the Four Treatises, which is no different from the highest Buddhist tantras; as soon as he is finished, he receives offerings and praise from the bodhisattvas; then there are more portents of the work’s future destiny and an exhortation to the reader to hold and read it in order to reach nirvana. The entire scene it paints is redolent of what is so familiar in Mahāyāna Buddha Word scriptures that proceed through the Buddha’s blessings or permission, as when Śākyamuni praises Avalokiteśvara for his utterance of the Heart Sūtra. And yet the narrative also makes clear that the Four Treatises is not actually Word: it is śāstra.

It is puzzling that the same person, Sumtön Yeshé Zung, argues for the Buddha Word status of the Four Treatises in one work, while in another, otherwise overlapping account he lets slip that Yutok composed it, and that it is a śāstra. This may represent a shift on the part of Yeshé Zung. In the course of writing the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story, he goes over the top in his praise and respect for the Four Treatises; he also repeatedly makes the strong case that the “True Dharma” of the Buddha and medicine should be seen as thoroughly integrated and stridently attacks those who try to separate them.⁴⁹ Still, he stops short of making it Buddha Word. And yet in another moment of increased boldness, i.e., on the occasion of writing the Crucial Lineage Biography, he does confer that highest status to the Four Treatises and also places it into the Treasure tradition.⁵⁰ The discrepancy is confusing to Tibetan scholars too, and some posit that these two seminal accounts were written by different authors with the same name.⁵¹

In the end, Yeshé Zung’s inconsistency is part and parcel of a tug of war already under way. In the narratives being offered for the Four Treatises’ genesis, heavy machinery brought in from Buddhist theories of enlightenment and enlightened preaching, along with the transmission wizardry supplied by the Treasure narrative, would have obviated any historical discrepancies apparent to some. Once attention turns to the historical personage of Yutok Yönten Gönpo, however, there is some ambivalence, although he is in any event elevated to high spiritual standing in Buddhist terms. That can make him either a true emanation of the Buddha or merely a latter-day follower who composed the work, albeit with the most enlightened intentions. The difference is slender, but much significance attends which way the attribution tips.

COMMENTARIAL THINKING, HISTORICAL THINKING

Commentaries on the Four Treatises’ medical teachings also appeared soon after the work’s codification. At first the Buddha Word question seems to have been muted, and either no note was taken of it or the matter was dispensed with swiftly. One early commentary invokes the Word/śāstra distinction and labels the Four Treatises as Word by virtue of a blessing.52 But it moves through these topics quickly and seems to be repeating an established position rather than arguing anything new. Several other early commentaries simply gloss the opening elements of the Four Treatises’ basic setting, noting that the title provided at the beginning of the work indicates that it was translated from an Indian language.⁵³

But in assessing commentarial polemics, we need to keep in mind how the very nature of commentary affects the way the root text’s claims are received. The root text commences with the Medicine Buddha empowering Sage Intelligent Gnosis to preach; the commentaries must start with that basic setting too. It is hard to imagine a commentary—at least in the Indo-Tibetan literary world—that would call into question the very genre features that make a work worthy of a commentary in the first place. Johannes Bronkhorst has gone so far as to wonder if commentarial practice placed a severe restriction on scientific innovation and imagination, at least in South Asia.⁵⁴ Even the powerful Desi was circumspect in the commentarial arena. Certainly many medical commentators simply accepted their root text’s claims, especially since the main concern for many would have been to get beyond the introductory sections to the medical knowledge in the work. Even when the larger intellectual and perhaps political implications of the Four Treatises’ status came into focus, the boldest of the commentators—Zurkharwa himself—still had to respect the opening lines of the original text.

One of the earliest commentaries we have that provides substantive comment on the opening passage of the Four Treatises was written by the intriguing fourteenth-century medical historian Drangti Pelden Tsoché, mentioned in the last chapter.55 Drangti also implicitly accepts the Four Treatises’ status and basic setting, but he betrays awareness of arguments already in progress. He seems to have been the first to weigh different options regarding something that would later become a key point of debate, namely the medical city Tanaduk, site of the Four Treatises’ preaching. The nature and location of this place seem to have been a concern even for the root text itself, which addressed the topic in unusual detail. Drangti takes up the question of where this city might be and goes through a number of opinions. One is Oḍḍiyāna, also the claim of the Crucial Lineage Biography; another is Mount Sumeru; another is a paradise mentioned in the Avataṃsakasūtra.⁵⁶ Drangti ends up placing Tanaduk in Akaniṣṭha, an important paradise for Tibetan Buddhism, and staunchly defends this conclusion.⁵⁷

Tanaduk was probably a problem because it is not associated with medical teachings in any Indic work.⁵⁸ The name itself (Skt. Sudarśana) is known, however, as one of the golden mountain ranges around Sumeru in Abhidharma cosmology.⁵⁹ We will see how this curious issue about the location of Tanaduk qua site of the Four Treatises’ preaching sets the stage for the real stripes of the medical mentality to show in Zurkharwa’s treatment. For now we can note that Drangti’s earlier solution, to locate it in a classical buddha field, is no surprise, since he is clearly a strong supporter of the Buddha Word position and the Four Treatises’ Treasure transmission in his more famous work, his history of medicine.⁶⁰ Although Drangti gives a lot of valuable historical detail about medicine in Tibet, when it comes to the Four Treatises he seems uninterested in taking issue with the work’s status. He contrasts the category of Buddha Word with śāstra but does not acknowledge that anyone has actually argued that the Four Treatises itself might be śāstra.⁶¹ Such a move will be used by later authors too, and sometimes becomes a strategy that allows key points to be scored without admitting that anything is amiss.

Another Four Treatises commentator added further nuance to the Buddha Word position. This was Namgyel Drakzang (1395–1475), founder of the Jangpa school of Tibetan medicine.62 He specifies that the Four Treatises is the kind of Buddha Word that is “spoken by a manifestation,” rather than “actually” by the Buddha.⁶³ He is referring to Intelligent Gnosis, the preacher of the Four Treatises; there would not be a move to capitalize on Yutok’s own identification as a “manifestation” for another two centuries. Namgyel Drakzang specifies that the Four Treatises is sūtra, and belongs specifically in the gāthā section of the Buddhist canon. He is clearly aware of a variety of debates on the whole issue, and summarizes them on careful and scholarly grounds. While some say the Four Treatises is not a scripture since it was not spoken directly by the Buddha, Namgyel Drakzang observes that such a standard would mean that many other scriptures would also not be Buddha Word, including the exalted Hevajratantra.⁶⁴ He also argues convincingly that the Buddha emanated countless manifestations to help him in his work for sentient beings, so the fact that the work was actually uttered by a manifestation hardly disqualifies the Four Treatises from being Buddha Word.

Namgyel Drakzang knows of a position claiming that the Four Treatises was actually created in Tibet, although there is no such statement in any of the early works currently available to us. He is not motivated to take it up and simply dismisses it with a vague gesture to reigning consensus: many learned people believe that Vairocana translated the text into Tibetan from an Indian language.⁶⁵ It would only be Namgyel Drakzang’s successor, Tashi Pelzang, who would betray the extent to which a critical and empiricist argument was in full swing—which the conservative Jangpa exegetes were endeavoring to forestall.⁶⁶

Tashi Pelzang is solidly in his predecessor’s camp but is far more polemical. Something has shifted in the landscape. We do know that a momentous liberty had been taken at some moment prior to when Tashi Pelzang wrote a free-standing essay dedicated to proving the Four Treatises’ status as Buddha Word.⁶⁷ The liberty involved but a single word, but it strongly suggests that some concerns had emerged in the medical community’s view of the Four Treatises. To wit, the emblematic line “Thus have I heard at one time” had been shifted to read instead “Thus have I explained at one time,” at least in some versions.⁶⁸ The new phrase is a rather glaring sign that someone wanted to communicate something special about the authorship of the Four Treatises. To say “explained” would be an acknowledgment that the work is not, as the standard formula would have it, a record of a teaching of the Buddha by a mnemically gifted scribe such as Ānanda, but rather is something that the purported scribe himself had originally “explained.” Canonical Buddhist scriptures can either name an interlocutor/scribe or, more commonly, simply remain silent on who committed their content to writing, but the content itself is still cast as a firsthand recounting of a buddha’s teaching in oral form. In contrast, the new opening phrase for the Four Treatises would appear to collapse scribe and teacher/author, and thus perhaps not be Buddha Word at all but rather a mere worldly composition by the work’s scribe.⁶⁹ Although Zurkharwa would later argue that it doesn’t make much of a difference which verb is used, Tashi Pelzang’s vociferous defense of the Four Treatises’ canonical status shows his cognizance of formidable opponents to his conservative views.

Samten Karmay calls Tashi Pelzang’s arguments “narrow and dogmatic and most of the time very naïve.” Harsh words from a modern scholar, but they are probably deserved.70 One’s position on the Four Treatises’ status maps onto one’s willingness to take into account empirical evidence, even if it contradicts received tradition.⁷¹ And clearly, Tashi Pelzang was not uncomfortable ignoring empirical evidence.

Tashi Pelzang’s complexly argued work is a fascinating artifact, and deserves more detailed study than is possible here. Among other things, he may have been the first to name as such the problem of whether there was actually ever an Indian text of the Four Treatises, which at least suggests a willingness to consider questions of historical evidence.⁷² But Tashi Pelzang dodges the implications. Instead, he reviews the entire nature of the translation of Indic Buddhist scriptures into Tibetan and then lays out the Treasure version of the Four Treatises’ later transmission.⁷³ He claims that it was due to jealousy of Sumtön Yeshé Zung’s singular inheritance of the work that certain individuals first began to claim that the Four Treatises were really written by Yutok himself.⁷⁴ This proposal confirms the image of Sumtön as embattled, but it turns on its head the idea that Sumtön felt vulnerable about the Buddha Word claim. Tashi Pelzang submits instead that such doubts were the work of disgruntled colleagues.

Although we are presently missing most of the works that put forward the arguments against Buddha Word status to which Tashi Pelzang is responding, those who made this point, whose names were later supplied by Zurkharwa, were not specialists in medical theory or history but rather outstanding scholars of Buddhist practice and thought. They include the prolific scholar Bodong Panchen Choklé Namgyel (1375–1451);75 the Sakyapa scholar-saint Taktsang Lotsawa Sherap Rinchen (1405–?), who did author, among many other things, a survey of medical practices;⁷⁶ the brilliant and critical Sakyapa exegete Shakya Chokden (1428–1507);⁷⁷ and one Dzagön Gyawo. Zurkharwa also mentions the great historian Butön Rinchen Drup (1290–1364) as someone who considered the matter but did not come to a decision.⁷⁸ The list in itself illustrates how widely the history of medicine was being discussed, and how widely (that is, at least among intellectuals) critical and historicist criteria were being brought to bear. A brief statement that survives in a letter by Shakya Chokden—written to Namgyel Drakzang, in fact—illustrates how far the thinking had come.⁷⁹ Shakya Chokden does not raise the specter of Tibetan authorship but merely focuses on the impossibility that the text was taught by the Buddha. He is well aware of Indic Ayurvedic tradition and the fact that its teachings are attributed ultimately to the god Brahmā.⁸⁰ He is savvy enough to ask why, if Brahmā and the Buddha are synonymous, and the Four Treatises and Ayurveda were originally preached by the Buddha, the great Ayurvedic commentary Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā does not cite the Four Treatises. Nor does the Aṣṭāṅga mention the Buddha in its history of medical teachings. Shakya Chokden also points out that if the Buddha taught the four Vedas (including Ayurveda), such a scene would have preceded his turning of the wheel of the Buddhist Dharma, which he finds implausible. It would mean that the complex Ayurvedic śāstras such as the Aṣṭāṅga would have preceded the clear and easily understandable Buddha Word scriptures, reversing the ordinary sequence of things whereby the lucid teachings come first. He even notes that the attribution of non-Buddhist medical teachings to the Buddha destroys any distinction between what is Buddhist and what is not (using again the monikers “insider” and “outsider” to denote such a distinction). Such powerful arguments with clear investment in textual history and coherent sequentiality would have posed an estimable challenge to those who sought to defend the Four Treatises as Buddha Word.

Tashi Pelzang does not name his interlocutors in his defense of the Four Treatises’ status, but does work through key arguments that various doubters have raised.⁸¹ One takes up the unconventionality of the opening line of the Four Treatises that reads, at least in his version, “Thus have I explained at one time.” Tashi Pelzang plausibly responds that this anomalous opening has to do with the ambiguity of identity between the teacher of the work and its compiler (both Intelligent Gnosis and Mind-Born are manifestations of the Buddha), and adds that a similar ambiguity obtains in other canonical works too.⁸²

We begin to see Tashi Pelzang’s approach to inconvenient empirical facts in his response to another critical point raised by some: that “there is no certainty that the city called Tanaduk exists here.”⁸³ “Here” would seem to refer to the world in which we live. The main force of the question has to do with the problem that the city is nowhere to be seen. In his answer Tashi Pelzang adverts instead to the magical power of the Buddha, adding that many places mentioned in the sūtras are not visible, especially to those with bad karma, and especially in these degenerate times. Tashi Pelzang says that Tanaduk was a city that was magically produced by the Buddha at Varanasi in India, and that buddhas regularly produce things magically. He closes his response by insisting, “just because you don’t see it does not mean that it does not exist.” Thus would he take the steam out of any argument based on eyewitness.

What has shifted most, visible in many of the rest of the points against which Tashi Pelzang attempts to defend, is the move into Tibetan specificities alongside the strictly Buddhological issues. This signals a growing sense among Tashi Pelzang’s interlocutors that there are actually two issues at stake: not only is the Four Treatises not Buddha Word, it wasn’t even translated from an Indian language at all and is actually a Tibetan composition. For example, Tashi Pelzang’s sharp-eyed opponents compare the medical system in the Four Treatises to that found in the Aṣṭāṅga and note that the main “eight sections” in the Indic texts and the Four Treatises are different.84 For his response, Tashi Pelzang is shrewd enough again to go back to his Buddhological repertoire, maintaining for example that the Buddhist sūtra Suvarṇaprabhāsottama also has a different list of these sections, and asking sarcastically if that then means that the Suvarṇa was composed in Tibet too.⁸⁵

But in several of the Tibet-focused arguments, Tashi Pelzang cannot always take recourse to the Buddha’s infinite flexibility. Sometimes he must appeal instead to a strategy on the part of the imputed translators. For example, when a tellingly Tibetan feature of the Four Treatises is raised—namely, that the work mentions the Bön religion—his response is to suggest that the translators compassionately rendered certain non-Buddhist (again, “outsider”) rites that appear in the Indian version as Bönpo rites, so that Tibetans could have access to such worldly rituals, including those connected with gods like Brahmā and Indra, when they needed them. What is more, such means are used in many of the Buddha’s teachings, such as doctrines of the tīrthikas in the Kālacakra.⁸⁶ Or again, on the point that the Four Treatises betrays its Tibetan origins when it mentions tea, since it is known that there is no tea in India, Tashi Pelzang floats the idea that the translators rendered what was paṇ (i.e., pān, betel leaves) in the original Indic text as the Tibetan for tea (ja), judiciously deciding that it was the best analogue to pān in the Tibetan context.⁸⁷

Sometimes he is even forced to admit a possibility that is at odds with his own convictions. When in another, very clever salvo the opponent points out that the system seen in the Four Treatises, wherein vitality resides in the head and the pervading wind resides in the heart, contradicts what is found in the Kālacakra and other tantras, and therefore proves that the Four Treatises was composed in Tibet, land of ignoramuses, Tashi Pelzang is reduced to averring that actually it is rare to find any Buddha scripture that has no errors.88 In another case, his refusal to acknowledge the evidence is starting to wear thin. An opponent shrewdly points out that the system of five elements found in the Four Treatises’ pulse system is aligned with Chinese “black divination,” which would again make it unlikely to have been composed in India.⁸⁹ Tashi Pelzang can only invoke the compassion and magical power of the Buddha again, wanly pointing out that the Buddha is omniscient and knows all systems, and so of course will use whatever will help all beings.⁹⁰

Worse yet, in response to the astute observation that since the Four Treatises’ diagnostic systems include images of a supine tortoise, the work is indebted to Tibetan conceptions not known in other Buddha Word, Tashi Pelzang asserts categorically, without providing any evidence, that the supine tortoise can be found in both Buddha Word and śāstra.⁹¹ Or again, when he responds to a point that since the text refers to porcelain and porcelain is not known in India, it can’t be an Indian work, he pronounces that indeed porcelain actually appeared first in India.⁹² And in response to the observation that would be the delight of later critics, namely that the Four Treatises’ reference to the quintessential Tibetan food tsam pa makes it pretty likely that the work was composed in Tibet, Tashi Pelzang simply ducks the point, challenging his opponent instead: Is it also the case that because the Four Treatises mentions tea, it was composed in China? Or since it advises the consumption of beer and meat on occasion, that it was written only for rich people?⁹³

In the end, his defense comes down to either invoking the omniscience of the Buddha that anticipates the needs of all sentient beings, ignoring the evidence and claiming an expedient translation/adjustment to fit the Tibetan situation, or simply denying the issue outright. His approach helps identify a critical distinction. From the buddhalogical perspective, it does usually work to cite the Buddha’s omniscience and compassion to smooth over all evident incommensurabilities.⁹⁴ In this way, Buddhist hermeneutics introduces a wild card: anything can happen. But Tashi Pelzang’s opponents are not interested in such a solution. They are more interested in establishing the reality of their root text’s origins on empirically verifiable grounds.

Note that in invoking empirical realities rather than the Buddha’s infinite powers, these opponents don’t have a wild card of their own. But what is telling for our purposes is the kind of resources they bring to bear instead. The arguments about tea and porcelain and calendars and tsam pa and the Bönpos all bespeak an astute sensibility about cultural and even climatic difference. They are about historical and regional specificity, not at all about a universalist dispensation, as in the common Buddhist notion of “all sentient beings” or the like. Most of all, they are about Tibetan particularities—which is most appropriate, since they are trying to demonstrate the Tibetan provenance of the work—and here I would note again the shift from the issue of Buddha Word to country of origin. We can begin to discern in Tashi Pelzang’s putative opponents indications of a scientistic mentality that values observation of local realities over received tradition.

As we continue to track this growing mentality, we should also note how the field in which the medical Buddha Word debate played differed significantly from the one in which the Treasure scriptures were defended as Buddha Word, at least in one important respect. The critics of the Buddha Word status of the Four Treatises not only came from outside its own lineage and tradition, as they did in the Treasure case; some were also fellow medical theorists, fellow commentators on the text. Strikingly, those medical scholars did not for that reason reject the Four Treatises as wrong or not valuable. Not being Buddha Word was starting not to be an intolerable flaw.

EXPLICIT DISSENT

So far we have noticed some defensiveness or muted discomfort among those who positioned the Four Treatises as Buddha Word, and some probing criticisms of that position on empirical grounds, albeit reported mostly secondhand. A century after Tashi Pelzang, two outstanding Four Treatises commentators wrote long and considered firsthand statements arguing that the Four Treatises is not actually Buddha Word, and is instead a Tibetan composition. This allows a direct look at medical writers making a case for the importance of historical verity. They are far less blunt than what Tashi Pelzang represents. Indeed, they have to make their case very cautiously, carefully preserving their own Buddhist sensibilities and loyalties. Nonetheless, they begin to lay out a different set of criteria for credibility—a key but vague factor, as Steven Shapin has shown, in all scientific discourse—than what was assumed so widely in the intellectual history of Tibetan Buddhism, namely, that the Buddha’s revelation has ultimate epistemic authority over all knowledge.95

Kyempa Tsewang and Zurkharwa Lodrö Gyelpo were contemporaries, and both were part of the Zur medical lineage. They knew each other and had some interchange; Kyempa was the elder.⁹⁶ They represent a moment of second-order awareness of the implications of the challenge to Buddhist authority in the Four Treatises Buddha Word debate, a growing sense that there might be more than one system of knowledge and all truth need not be grounded in the Word of the Buddha.

At least three separate discussions of the matter by Zurkharwa are extant, written over the course of many years, and very complex in their rhetoric. We might look at his elder Kyempa’s statement first. While Kyempa is not quite as bold or detailed, he decisively sets the stage for his younger colleague’s salvos.

Unlike many other medical writers, Kyempa wrote a commentary on the entire Four Treatises, and it has fortunately survived.97 This fine work has only recently been recognized by modern scholarship. It was certainly known to Tibetan academic medicine in the centuries after it was written, but it seems never to have been published in blockprint form.

It is a measure of how far the Four Treatises expository tradition had come that Kyempa could venture into intellectual issues quite beyond the business of commenting on the words in the root text as such. This is especially evident in the first section of the work, “an explication on the general meaning of the text,” which amounts to a full essay in three chapters on the relationship of medicine and the Buddha’s teachings. Given the delicacy of the issue, Kyempa seems aware of all he needs to do to contextualize what he is going to say, and he draws freely upon advances made in other parts of the Tibetan intellectual world.

Kyempa backs way up to get the big picture. The first chapter reminds the reader of the place of medicine in the five sciences, the larger benefits of studying medicine, and an array of Buddhist perspectives on the importance of compassion and other virtues for both teachers and students. This discussion goes on for a full eleven pages in large-size Western-style book format, in a work that often otherwise moves quickly from point to point. Kyempa displays an impressive facility in the history of Buddhist thought. He makes a compelling case that medicine is clearly within the purview of Buddhist tradition, is of great value, and preserves much useful information about student-teacher relations and a range of important ethical questions. Practicing medicine will even lead eventually to enlightenment.

The second chapter goes into the weighty issue at hand. Kyempa clears the stage by launching into a survey of the entire distinction between “Word and śāstra,” starting with the kinds of Buddha Word. He duly preserves the three subtypes already laid out in Soaring Garuda and supplies examples for each from canonical Buddhist works. Then he defines kinds of śāstra, also drawing from classical Buddhist sources. He displays further judiciousness in naming three kinds of lineages associated with the Four Treatises itself, based on authorization, explanation, or meaning.98 And then he finally springs his own assertion: the Four Treatises is the third type of śāstra, a compilation of many textual traditions rolled into one by Jetsün Mahāguṇa (a hybrid Tibetan and Sanskrit moniker for Yutok Yönten Gönpo).⁹⁹

Kyempa compellingly reiterates his claim for Yutok’s authorship in the last chapter of this introductory section when he cites a long passage from the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story. This is the passage flagged above, the one that used the telling word “compose.” It is also the same passage that explicitly calls the Four Treatises a śāstra. This statement was already notable in its original context, but now, in the midst of a concerted debate, it is all the more striking. After all, these sentences were uttered by Yutok himself, as Kyempa himself reminds us.¹⁰⁰

Throughout his discussion Kyempa provides a variety of defenses. He is clearly expecting a rebuttal. He invokes an argument that had been made before, and would seem to be unwarranted: it would not be appropriate, Kyempa insists, to say the Four Treatises is the Word of the teacher Medicine Buddha and his manifestation Intelligent Gnosis, citing the recurring phrase “for one teaching two teachers don’t come.”¹⁰¹ But he also has a slew of historicist points. We don’t find the city Tanaduk as the site of preaching other works that are Buddha Word. Nor does its physical description match what we know either from authoritative sources or reason, he adds.¹⁰² It is only Zurkharwa who would actually unpack why it is not reasonable. Indeed, later on in the commentary Kyempa himself cites Zurkharwa on the question of Tanaduk, indicating that what Zurkharwa wrote set the standard on this issue.¹⁰³

Kyempa insists that the Four Treatises is heterogeneous in its origins and combines many medical traditions from both India and China.104 He draws on the work’s own statements about its fourfold audience—gods, sages, tīrthikas, and Buddhists—to raise a question about the temporal relationship between the Four Treatises and the medical works of other traditions. Like Shakya Chokden, Kyempa was well aware that Ayurveda was ultimately said to have been preached by Brahmā, and he thematizes the problem specifically with regard to the timing of the teachings of the Buddha. The Four Treatises itself states that it compiles all medical teachings, including the “eight sections of the Caraka” taught for the sages. Given that it presents these teachings in the form of a compilation put together later, i.e., after their initial creation, Kyempa maintains that the Four Treatises must be śāstra. If it had somehow been in existence before the Caraka and so on were compiled, i.e., had been the source of the Caraka and Ayurveda more generally, it would not fit with the temporality of Ānanda, the disciple of the Buddha and the imputed compiler of all Buddha Word.¹⁰⁵ In other words, the Buddha could not be the ultimate origin of these teachings since they already existed before he lived. Kyempa also points out here that if they were taught at the same time, it would be confusing to consider the sage tradition (i.e., Ayurveda) and its compilation (i.e., the Four Treatises itself) as different. In this he displays his conviction that classical Ayurveda and the Four Treatises are not identical.

Once again we might notice the disparity between such a concern and appeals to the all-encompassing and timeless magical power of the Buddha on the part of Tashi Pelzang. The fact that Kyempa, and Shakya Chokden before him, were paying attention to when the Buddha and Ānanda would have lived vis-à-vis Ayurvedic textual history shows a keen appreciation of historical sequentiality in adjudicating questions of authorship.¹⁰⁶ Kyempa is adamant in this argument, insisting that it is not possible to reply to him.¹⁰⁷

And yet once Kyempa leaves this opening section and commences the commentary as such, he is more cautious. He skillfully manages to follow the text in all its claims, but slightly shifts its points in order to avoid accepting its status as Buddha Word. Such a strategy is already evident in his initial list of the lineage of teachers prior to Yutok—those who putatively would have transmitted it from India down to Tibet. He is not yet commenting on the words of the text itself; instead he is invoking received tradition in the medical world about the history of the Four Treatises qua Buddha Word, transmitted from India to Tibet and then concealed as Treasure. He characterizes this as the lineage of “authoritative sources, the basis of composition (rtsom gzhi),” a category he himself had set up as one of the kinds of transmission associated with the Four Treatises. It almost appears to be a story that he himself is telling of the origin of the Four Treatises, except that he closes the whole section with the succinct but possibly skeptical salvo, “so it is said.” Representing tradition does not necessarily entail Kyempa himself accepting it.¹⁰⁸

Once Kyempa gets to unpacking the full title of the Four Treatises, he tackles the task at hand without noting the possible implications of the fact that a Sanskrit title is provided along with its Tibetan translation.¹⁰⁹ Kyempa just discusses kinds of translation, using categories well known in Tibetan Buddhist scholasticism, but skirts the question of whether indeed this work is such a translation.

Apparently, unlike the version that Tashi Pelzang was working from, Kyempa’s text of the Four Treatises did begin “Thus have I heard at one time.”110 This clarion call of Buddha Word would have been one more element of the work that he must duly analyze phrase by phrase, part of his duty as a commentator on the text at hand. While he does not accept the implications of that loaded introductory sentence, as a commentator he could hardly claim that the text is lying, so he has to use other interpretive strategies to bring out his critique.

In all of this we can see the force exerted by the genre of commentary itself. But it is also the case that this force can be subverted even as its conventions are heeded. One such occasion presents itself as Kyempa goes through the requisite “five excellences” of the basic setting—the Medicine Buddha in Tanaduk, the preaching by the manifested sage, and so on. Here he does signal his dissent, albeit elliptically:

[The Four Treatises] is arranged with a basic setting of five excellences, in this according with the way Buddha Word is explained, so that disciples will come to hold it on their crowns. If smart people analyze the meaning of the words carefully, they will come to realize what is the special meaning to be understood.¹¹¹

This is subtle, but there can be no mistake about what he is saying. The Four Treatises is set up to look like Buddha Word so that people will honor the text. That’s why the five excellences introduce the work, and that’s why Kyempa as commentator will duly unpack them. Having given a clear signal of how “smart people” should understand the artifice, Kyempa launches into explaining the details of that original scene of preaching, without another word to the contrary, going through the detailed description of Tanaduk and all its various plants with little hint of doubt—save a brief comment at the end referring the reader to Zurkharwa’s analysis, and noting again how “smart people” will check into the sources.¹¹² But prior to that concluding caveat he seems to be having a good time with all the botany, evidently enjoying the occasion to display his knowledge of herbs.¹¹³

As would Zurkharwa, Kyempa wants to honor the pretexts of the root text without undue disturbance. Perhaps in this he is not unlike modern scholars: able to hold apart critical assessment of the historical claims of a story even while appreciating the narrative on its own terms, relishing its inner logic and the experiences and ideas it explores.

ZURKHARWA’S CAUTION

A distinction between the world inside the text and the world outside it is indicated even more keenly by Zurkharwa Lodrö Gyelpo.114 Zurkharwa goes to great lengths, and quite self-consciously, to pay due respect to what is credible in a Buddhist world as this is represented in the basic setting of the Four Treatises. But he also makes sure not to violate the sensibilities of the medical intelligentsia, who could not ignore the external criteria that make the Four Treatises not attributable to the historical Buddha and not composed in India.

There is also a second tier to Zurkharwa’s negotiation of the Buddha Word debate, a move to a higher level of analysis. Who the author is ultimately does not matter; what really matters is the value of the work. Anything that is of such fundamental benefit to people could be said to be on a par with the Buddha’s dispensation. So even if the Four Treatises is not historically Buddha Word, it might have a similar status in this more important sense. Zurkharwa adverts to Buddhist hermeneutics in order to make this point, yet effects a dethronement of the Buddha’s unique authority in the process.

This second-order reflection bespeaks a modern sensibility. Our appreciation of value and meaning need not be undermined by historical knowledge, in this case, who the author of the work really was. Rather, it is precisely this knowledge that can elicit the higher-order perspective. Long before, in the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story, care had already been taken to assert that the Four Treatises was no different from Buddha Word in the strength of its blessings. Zurkharwa draws on that move and runs with it. He eventually mounts a fully critical hermeneutic that understands the Four Treatises’ opening setting in terms of psychological aspiration: the work’s actual historical authors were fancying themselves as Buddha Word utterers. He also appreciates those historical actors’ canny sense of what plays as credible in the Tibetan literary world, a reading so skillful that there is not the slightest hint of accusing Yutok and company of fabrication or dissimulation. But in all of this we can also detect the stakes in taking an anti-Buddha Word position, and how conservative and fierce was the protection of the all-encompassing author function of the Buddha. It is almost as if Zurkharwa could anticipate in advance the scathing critique that the Dalai Lama’s powerful regent would level against him in the following century, when enlightened charisma and the Tibetan state truly became one. Thus did he become ingenious in protecting his back. This is not to suggest he was being disingenuous. It is eminently clear that he was both reconciling and making sense—in ways that were credible to him—of the growing epistemic disparities between academic medicine and the Buddhist establishment. His own enduring allegiance to the assumptions of Buddhist soteriology and praxis will especially come into view in the next chapter. But they are also evident in his careful approach to the loaded issue of the Buddha’s authorship that we will follow now.

Zurkharwa’s painstaking maneuvers can only be appreciated in light of his entire oeuvre, from which vantage the nuances of his line-by-line strategies—some of which we also must read line by line!—become clear. Zurkharwa discussed the Buddha Word status of the Four Treatises in at least three separate works.115 In each case he handles the delicate matter differently. This in itself is interesting, for it shows the way that different literary contexts allow different levels of frankness. It also may mean that he was working out what he himself thought. Or then again, it might just be that he always knew what he thought, but took time to lay it out publicly. My own guess is that the latter is closer to the reality. We even have an early indication that Zurkharwa had grave doubts about the traditional attribution on ethical grounds as well: How can we think that the compassionate Buddha would have taught the painful procedures in the Four Treatises’ therapeutics? he asks in one of the questions he posted on the pillar in Lhasa.¹¹⁶ Such a point fits with Zurkharwa’s general sense that medicine has ways and means that are distinct from those of the dispensation of the Buddha—the Great Medicine King’s own concern to heal the world’s ills notwithstanding.

Zurkharwa’s Ancestors’ Advice, his magnum opus commentary on the Four Treatises, appears to be his first substantial statement on the authorship of the root medical treatise.¹¹⁷ This work is only beginning to get the recognition it is due, at least in Western scholarship. It offers brilliant and probing discussions of many key issues in the Four Treatises, often far surpassing anything that came before it. The previous chapter noted the Dalai Lama’s efforts to complete and publish it, as well as the indebtedness of the Desi’s Blue Beryl to it. Several other issues from Ancestors’ Advice will be examined in the following chapters; as here, the history of their discussion reveals careful negotiation of the sometimes conflicting concerns for scientific accountability and religious sensibility.

Since Ancestors’ Advice is Zurkharwa’s main study of the Four Treatises, one might think it should be his definitive statement on the Buddha Word question, but in fact it is his most conservative. Most likely, the main reason for his circumspection is the expectations and demands of the commentarial genre. In fact, without the other two treatments it would be hard to discern what Zurkharwa is saying on the issue in Ancestors’ Advice. With the exception of a few key lines, one could almost read it to be in the Buddha Word camp.

As in Kyempa’s commentary, the Buddha Word question comes up right at the beginning. Zurkharwa quickly makes clear that he thinks the Four Treatises should be classed as śāstra. Granted, he does this largely by indirection. Discussing the very need for the Four Treatises, i.e., the basic reason it exists, he starts right up with a variety of classic sources on the standards for writing good and bad śāstras.118 That in itself already says a lot, of course. Why start with an exposition on śāstra if the work he is about to comment on is Buddha Word? He never actually owns up to this, though, except to say rather unobtrusively that the classic quotes should be understood “here” as well.¹¹⁹ Then again, that would actually say it all.

Zurkharwa goes on to address the topic of translation methods, and duly talks about the Sanskrit title, but like Kyempa, he adroitly avoids the question of whether this work was indeed translated. He seems to be accomplishing other aims in this section, such as showing off his knowledge of things Sanskritic.

When he gets to the all-important opening phrase, he betrays detailed knowledge of a long-running debate and the fact that different versions of the text vary in whether they read “heard” or “explained.” Rather surprisingly, Zurkharwa argues that it should read “Thus have I heard at one time,” i.e., the classic marker of Buddha Word.¹²⁰ His reason for preferring “heard” rests on the inner logic of the setting, and the importance of respecting the conventions of the five excellences.¹²¹ And he is right. Given that the Four Treatises is set up in this way, with Intelligent Gnosis uttering the work and Mind-Born compiling it, the work should have been “heard,” by the compiler; it does not make sense to say “explained.” As I proffered above, “explained” seems like a guilty admission that something is amiss in the author function of the work. Zurkharwa seems to share this assumption, in his response to certain critics: “Those whose learning is inferior say, ‘According to your way, all these terms of the basic setting like “Thus have I heard” would make the work Word. But that is not tenable, since it was put together by the compiler.’”¹²²

Zurkharwa deems it an ignorant implication that for the opening line to read “heard” would inappropriately make the work Word. He seems to be arguing with others in his own camp: even if the work was put together by the compiler, he suggests, don’t assume it should not begin “Thus have I heard.” But the way he states his reason is tricky. He grants that the Four Treatises is not Word spoken by the mouth of or blessed by the Buddha, but seems to be supporting the idea that it is Word by permission:

It is true that the words are not spoken by the mouth [of the Buddha], nor are they Word by virtue of a blessing. However, it is posited that it is Word by permission. From the Karuṇāpuṇḍarīka, “In future times, when you collect all of my Dharma, at that time first make use of the basic setting by virtue of [the phrase] ‘Thus have I heard’ and so on. In the middle put in all the arranged words. And at the end insert ‘The Bhagavān fully praised this speech,’ since he had given his permission.”123

What does he mean by saying “it is posited” to be Word (bka’ yin par ’dod de)? This could refer to his own viewpoint, but in light of the next lines, a more likely reading is that the Four Treatises’ creator himself positioned it as Word by permission. In other words, Zurkharwa is still respecting the inner logic of the work. When he quotes the [Mahā?]karuṇāpuṇḍarīkasūtra, he would appear to be quoting an authoritative Buddhist canonical work, here giving instructions on how to compile Buddha Word in the future.¹²⁴ Every such work should begin by saying, “Thus have I heard,” and end by representing the Buddha’s praise of its contents, which will indicate that it has the permission of the Buddha. We cannot fail to notice the specification of “the future.” The passage Zurkharwa cites reflects a movement that began in the early centuries C.E. to open the door to the existence of many buddhas in addition to Śākyamuni, living in many buddha fields. That in turn meant that new Word of the Buddha scriptures would continue to appear. In Zurkharwa’s passage, the means to make such works conform to the appropriate genre conventions are clearly spelled out.

The critical issue of temporal discrepancy comes to the fore in the next lines. A different objector notes that if the compilation of the Four Treatises took place after the Buddha’s nirvana, the compiler, who was manifested before the Buddha entered nirvana, would also have had to dissolve back into the Buddha beforehand.125 Again, by “compiler” this objector is referring to Sage Mind-Born. Zurkharwa notes in annoyance that the Four Treatises says nothing of Mind-Born’s reabsorption into the Medicine Buddha, as is specified for Intelligent Gnosis at the end of each of the Four Treatises. The exchange seems trivial, but later, in another work, Zurkharwa makes clear that he thinks that the real compiler and teacher of the Four Treatises were none other than Sumtön and Yutok, respectively—people who indeed lived long after the Buddha’s nirvana. That subtext might inform the question he makes the objector raise here in Ancestors’ Advice, but he does not say so explicitly. He only bats away this objector “who is lacking in analytic skills” by retorting that manifested beings like compilers who are bent on the benefit of all beings do not reabsorb. It is almost as if Zurkharwa was deliberately setting the stage for his position on the real scene of compilation that he would make years later.

Zurkharwa does not spell out his ultimate position on the Buddha Word question in Ancestors’ Advice. But he does address one key piece of it in detail: the vexed matter of Tanaduk—its location, its status in the world. We already saw that Kyempa seems to have considered Zurkharwa’s discussion to be the locus classicus for the right approach to the issue.

Zurkharwa’s unusual and starkly empiricist reading rules out any possibility that Tanaduk is to be located in the real world at all. Strikingly, he rejects all such options that his medical predecessors proposed, such as Varanasi or Oḍḍiyāna.¹²⁶ As he says at one point in frustration,

As for that, there is absolutely nothing that is correct. Why? It says nothing about Tanaduk being Varanasi, and it cannot be established by either authoritative statements or logic. Varanasi does not have four mountains around it. Moreover, if Varanasi were to have all those special features, you would have to accept that the people living there would have no time, no death.¹²⁷

If a place called Tanaduk existed in the real world in the way that previous commentators believed the Four Treatises to be describing, it would not obey the normal rules about time and other natural processes. Much of this point has to do with incommensurabilities in how the mountains are described. One would appear to be always in the sun, one always illuminated by the moon. Zurkharwa also cites the “very long distance” between these mountains in reality, such that they could not surround a single town.¹²⁸ (Zurkharwa is referring to the actual geographical locations of the four mountains named here, which do indeed exist in the world, but he is distinguishing them from their invocation in the Four Treatises.) It is striking indeed to see him critiquing an exuberant and mythic picture of a place, so common in Buddhist scriptures, on the grounds that it is not plausible in terms of what we know about the real world and its geography.¹²⁹

Zurkharwa’s own take on Tanaduk is to regard the place as a kind of manifestation.130 This was also the solution of Tashi Pelzang. But this is what I meant by saying at the outset that sometimes almost identical propositions have a vastly different sense in context. While Tashi Pelzang’s line served to preserve the sanctity of Tanaduk by rejecting the direct evidence of what can be seen, Zurkharwa, I argue, moves Tanaduk out of the realm of the empirical in order to preserve the reality (if not the sanctity) of the everyday world. Making Tanaduk a manifestation—or even, as we will see later, a flight of fancy—serves to remove a vulnerability from the Four Treatises. It puts this and the other conceits of the “basic setting” into the realm of the magical, thus protecting the medical establishment from having to defend something that contradicts the everyday reality with which a medical scientist would be most concerned. As he insists, “If you say it had such qualities in the past but now in the present they no longer exist through the force of time, you can’t say that either. … Therefore wherever you put that city in this present world you will have a problem.”¹³¹

Zurkharwa is unrelenting in his resistance to any effort on the part of previous commentators to locate Tanaduk in the real world. Now he specifies that while the names that the Four Treatises gives for the four mountains surrounding Tanaduk are in fact the names of actual mountains in the real world, they are not what are referred to here. “All these are mere names. Their specific qualities with respect to the town don’t make sense. Even the other words are nothing but false constructions. There is nothing real there that is actually being touched, and so [those words] are superficial.”¹³²

What he argues instead is that those names are just being used figuratively to indicate the kind of herbs that grow there, but the town and the mountains could not actually exist in the world in the way that the text describes. Note also the striking statement that there is nothing real there that is being touched. He’s talking about the lack of empirical referent. He gets more specific, going through each of the four mountains, in each case granting the existence of a real place with that name, but then insisting that that’s not what is being referred to here.

First of all, the mountain to the south is called Vindhya. But that is just a designation; it is not the real (dngos) Vindhya Mountain. It is called that because on its side there is light and the power of the sun and all the plants that are made to grow there have salty and sour tastes. … In the same way, the mountain to the north whose side is in the shade and has the power of the moon is called Himavat but it is not the real Himavat.¹³³

Zurkharwa argues further, and again surprisingly, that the Four Treatises is not really describing four mountains at all. That to which these various mountain names are figuratively assigned are actually just the four sides of one mountain, on top of which Tanaduk is perched. Zurkharwa notes that previous generations of scholars did not realize this.134 Now, it is a bit perverse to read statements from the Four Treatises like “To the south of that town is a mountain with the power of the sun called Mount Vindhya” to be referring to a mountain slope running down from the southern side of the town, and so on.¹³⁵ It is furthermore not clear what is gained by this correction, other than to distinguish the originality of his reading and also perhaps to make the entire place slightly more plausible, with the sun reaching one side of a single mountain and another side always in the shade. But he also continues to maintain that Tanaduk can’t be real and is not a buddha field either, adding that the latter proposals bespeak an inability to “find grounds to recognize it [elsewhere] and so they just run to that.”¹³⁶

What he does do, however, is offer a bone to the devout reader who wants some resolution, and this admittedly challenges our line of interpretation. At the start of his “own position” on the matter, he ferrets out a quote, which he attributes to a work he calls Vibhāṣa, regarding the various places in which the Buddha lived and taught. One line refers to the Buddha living in a medicine forest for four years. Zurkharwa takes this to be an authoritative reference to Tanaduk, although the quote does not name such a place.¹³⁷ Zurkharwa maintains that at the center of the medical forest was a mountain with four sides, and on its top was the manifested town Tanaduk.¹³⁸ No one else had been able to find any hint of a place devoted to medicine in canonical sources. Such a salvo would behoove someone who is arguing that the Four Treatises is indeed Buddha Word, and it seems not at all consistent with Zurkharwa’s otherwise critical attitude to the verity of the town as described. But keeping in mind his main point that the town is actually a manifestation, the citation serves to locate it in the credible world of classical Buddhist literature even while confining it to that realm and resisting its existence otherwise, outside the texts and on the ground. In the process he is also positioning himself as an expert, even on a position he does not believe in.

We are not going to understand what Zurkharwa really means in all this until he is out of the commentarial context. But we have already seen him suggesting that the Four Treatises is śāstra, even while he contends that the self-presentation of the work makes it Buddha Word by permission. He alludes to the need to obey the genre conventions of Buddha Word and considers the time discrepancy between the lifespan of the manifested compiler and the Buddha from whom he would have manifested. Most of all, we just have to marvel at the treatment of Tanaduk. For one thing, there is the sheer amount of mileage that it gets: the Four Treatises itself already devotes a disproportionate number of lines to the place of its preaching. For his part, Zurkharwa spends a full twenty-two large Western-style pages on the “excellence of the place,” in contrast with one paragraph on the teacher, six pages on the retinue (also a conflicted issue), one paragraph on the time, and then six pages on the Dharma being taught (mostly motivated by the confusion about the multifarious retinue). The attention to Tanaduk shows an exceptional interest on the part of the medical thinkers in place as such, seen especially in how much Zurkharwa and others are taken up with the medical botany and the appropriate geography and climate of particular plants. At the minimum, the debate about Tanaduk evinces a characteristically medical emphasis on material conditions—the biosphere, if you will.139

Zurkharwa’s treatment helps us understand why the Tanaduk question was such a flashpoint for the Buddha Word debate. It is here that the nagging question of whether the Four Treatises is really the teaching of the Buddha or was made up by someone else comes home to roost. Discomfort is felt most keenly about place—if the place is not real, it can’t be a genuine teaching of the Buddha, somehow.¹⁴⁰ What emerges in the process of investigating Tanaduk is a standard by which truth will be determined: whether or not the description of a place matches how things really are in the world. And this is where Zurkharwa has already taken a major step, even if he does not yet tip his hand on where he is going with it. He has at least argued definitively in Ancestors’ Advice that Tanaduk as described is not a worldly place.

It is remarkable to see a vociferous insistence that the place where the most precious text of a tradition was preached must not be considered of this world. We might compare here the arguments put forward by certain Japanese intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in light of modern geographical knowledge, that the descriptions in the Buddha’s teachings of Meru, the central mountain of the old Buddhist cosmos, should not be taken literally but rather were metaphorical, and merely represent the cultural knowledge of the Buddha’s audience.¹⁴¹ Zurkharwa’s treatment of mythic place comes prior to Tibetan contact with European map-making, but already represents an impulse to relativize religious imagery so as to clear space for scientific knowledge.

THE HISTORY: ZURKHARWA PITCHES HIS TENT

Before looking at the free-standing essay in which Zurkharwa returns, now more boldly, to these same issues, his other major medical composition, entitled The Pitched Interior of General Knowledge, What Doctors Are Not Allowed Not to Know, merits our attention.142 This is his khokbuk history of medicine that the Desi critiqued so stridently. Here Zurkharwa considers other key pieces of the Word debate, which complement his discussion in Ancestors’ Advice. He is still being cautious, if on different grounds, but even so makes headway in dismantling the Four Treatises’ status as Buddha Word.

Zurkharwa’s Pitched Interior was a major advance in medical historiography. I summarized its overall structure in the previous chapter. Just like the Desi complained, it spends a lot of time on the Buddha and his canonical medical teachings, making a big point of accepting the proposition that the Buddha taught medicine. But when it finally turns to medicine in Tibet, it takes a more critical and historicist tone.

Ever the good historian, Zurkharwa begins his account of Tibetan medicine with a fair and lengthy survey of the views of others, starting with Soaring Garuda. This is followed by a long rehearsal of medical lineages and activities in Tibet. Then he returns to question many of the supposed medical teachings of the Buddha in the views he just discussed.¹⁴³ He rejects a lot as faulty or untrue, not to be found in the long accounts of the life of the Buddha, and asks his interlocutors where they found this information. He also criticizes claims that he says are associated with Bön and the Old School, and disparages Soaring Garuda and other works. He further mentions the difficulty of properly determining whether certain works are really Buddha Word spoken by mouth, or are blessed by the Buddha, or have the permission of the Buddha, or are śāstra, or what, quoting another work to say that apart from what a text says about itself, there is often no other evidence.¹⁴⁴ Again and again, he seems to delight in displaying his critical acumen in dismissing as groundless certain historical claims of others.

Then he gets to the stories that the Four Treatises was translated into Tibetan and then either hidden as Treasure and later taken out by Drapa Ngönshé, or passed down orally in a lineage of one to Mutik Tsenpo. And now Zurkharwa begins to show his stripes.

One big flaw in those stories would emerge if it could be shown that the Four Treatises was not in existence in Tibet before the time of Yutok Yönten Gönpo (i.e., the Younger; Zurkharwa evinces no knowledge of an “Elder” Yutok in imperial times). The claim that the work is Buddha Word rests on the premise that it was brought to Tibet from India by Vairocana during the imperial period, centuries before Yutok lived. As already suggested, the entire reason the Treasure theory was brought into the Four Treatises’ transmission history in the first place was to address the lack of evidence of the work’s existence in Tibet during the period from the time of Vairocana down to Yutok. The answer that the Treasure narrative proffers is that no one knew about it because it was hidden in the pillar at Samyé and discovered by Drapa Ngönshé at some point close to when Yutok lived.145 So to discredit this story would eventuate in the conclusion that it was written in that latter period, i.e., the eleventh to twelfth centuries.

This is what Zurkharwa is up to in this passage. He mounts a variety of arguments, including calculations of how long it had been from the time the Buddha died until the reign of Tri Songdetsen. One of his most effective arguments is to cite the biography of Drapa Ngönshé. That clearly mentions his study of medicine as a youth with his uncle and much other activity connected to medicine, Zurkharwa avers, but there is “not even a little bit” about him taking out the Four Treatises from Treasure; in fact, several of the elements in that account are mutually contradictory.¹⁴⁶

In the same way, Zurkharwa goes on, we need some signs that the Four Treatises was known in Tibet prior to Yutok, but there is not even a mention of such a name. He also points out that one of the Treasure biographies of Padmasambhava says that the Chinese doctor Heshang Ma[hāyā]na and the Tibetan doctor Tsenpashilaha translated the Bdud rtsi snying po gsang ba man ngag (these terms are similar to part of the Four Treatises’ title) in 156 chapters; if that were true, it would suggest that the Four Treatises is a translation from Chinese.¹⁴⁷ Zurkharwa is bent on illustrating that there are any number of reports about the origins of the Four Treatises, making the theory that it was discovered as Treasure by Drapa unlikely.

Zurkharwa goes on to mount this powerful coup de grace to destroy the entire idea that the Four Treatises was ever hidden as Treasure: “It does not make sense to have to bury it as Treasure on account of it being profound!”¹⁴⁸

“Being profound” is one of the main reasons teachers, quintessentially Padmasambhava, are said to bury Treasures. Because such teachings were too esoteric or complex for the people living in that era, the typical story goes, the teacher concealed them until a time in the future when the appropriate disciples who could appreciate and practice the teaching would appear. But, Zurkharwa cannily points out, how would this be an appropriate plan of action for a medical treatise?

And it does not make sense to distinguish near from far, i.e., between the beings of that time and those of the future, who, from the perspective of compassion, will need it later. Hence anyone who is intelligent will find it is easy to realize that these stories are like the six lies of the owl.149

This is a convincing argument. Unlike in the standard Buddhist Treasure rationale, it would never make sense for some compassionate teacher to think that medical practice is not appropriate now and only will be appropriate in the future. Surely the king would have wanted doctors to start practicing its techniques immediately.

Strong words, calling the Treasure story about the Four Treatises a pack of lies. And let us not miss the arresting difference in all this between medicine and the esoteric spiritual exercises described in the Buddhist Treasure scriptures. Medicine is always needed, and for everyone. It would never be restricted to special circles, nor earmarked for particular epochs.

Having dispatched this broadside, Zurkharwa ratchets his tone down. After a lengthy rehearsal of the efforts on the part of the Tibetan kings to bring medical teachings to Tibet from a variety of places in the known world, he moves to the postimperial period.¹⁵⁰ Here he provides details on the translation of the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya into Tibetan and the many lines of medical teachers in the following century, including the ones reaching Yutok.¹⁵¹

Finally, he gets to his “authentic account” of the Four Treatises itself, which he opens with another clever quip.¹⁵² The question of whether this work is Buddha Word or not or not is debated by the wise, the foolish, and everyone in between. Actually, the quip introduces exactly the approach he will take. Rather than leveling more caustic criticism, he will go back over the gamut of views on the topic, now simply representing them as a historian would: some say this, some say that.

That so many believe it is a teaching of the Medicine Buddha, originally translated by Vairocana and then transmitted as a Treasure or as an oral transmission (bka’ ma), motivates a judicious comment from Zurkharwa. It will require effort to cast sufficient aspersions to get people to accept that the Four Treatises are not Buddha Word. Even then, they will find reason to make it Word. But there also are many who claim it is fully a Tibetan śāstra, Zurkharwa goes on to aver.153 While allowing that some don’t have any good reason for this and just like to hold on to their own position and denigrate others, he recaps the plausible arguments that have been suggested. Some have based their conclusion on their examination of the way the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya is structured and presented; others on incriminating evidence in the substance of the Four Treatises’ content, basic setting, and overall intention. Then he pulls out the trump card that we lingered over and Kyempa also duly flagged: the powerful evidence of the Heart Sphere of Yutok Story passage, with its damning phrase “he composed the medical śāstra, the Four Treatises.”¹⁵⁴

Now Zurkharwa is really racking up points for the Tibetan śāstra side, displaying powerful evidence. But he keeps to a stance of impartiality and reasonableness. He reviews the ideas of scholars such as Nyamnyi Dorjé, who cited one Ja Mipam Chökyi; the Sakya scholar Taktsang Lotsawa; and others who ventured scenarios of how the Four Treatises was indeed authored by Yutok Yönten Gönpo, teamed variously with Drapa Ngönshé, Üpa Dardrak, and Tönchen Könkyab, or even by Vairocana himself. He can quote no less a luminary than Bodong Choklé Namgyel (1376–1451), who submitted that “The diagnosis of disease based on pulse and urine is not explained in the methods of the Indian scholars. [The Four Treatises] was made by a Tibetan doctor bodhisattva,” providing an important precedent for the empiricist arguments to which Tashi Pelzang tried to respond.¹⁵⁵ But Zurkharwa himself does not totter from his objective perch. In the end, he takes refuge in the uncertainty of another great light of Tibetan historiography, the polymath Butön Rinchen Drup. “As for me,” Zurkharwa says, “just as in the words of Omniscient Butön, I can’t make a decision.”¹⁵⁶ He is being judicious. He has presented damning evidence, especially against the Treasure theory, but he will remain open to the possibility that other considerations may prove him wrong after all.

Although he didn’t nail the coffin on the Word theory, what he goes on to say in conclusion is extraordinary. Even if the Four Treatises is not the Word of the Buddha, that is not of much moment. Rather, it is the content of the Four Treatises and its contribution to the world that is most important. As the Uttaratantra says particularly well in a quote that Zurkharwa offers here, “If one explains something with an undistracted mind merely under the influence of the Conqueror’s teachings, it will be in accordance with the path to attain liberation. Therefore I hold it to my head as if it were what the Sage [i.e., the Buddha] said.”¹⁵⁷ Zurkharwa takes the statement to apply to the Four Treatises; “as if it were” would be of course the critical phrase.

Note that Zurkharwa is citing a Buddhist source to make this point. He is drawing on hermeneutical criteria long developed in Buddhist contexts to determine authentic Buddha Word based on the truth value of a text’s content, but he uses the strategy to come to a different conclusion about the Four Treatises’ author.158 He hasn’t quite admitted straight out that he thinks the Four Treatises is not Buddha Word. He sidesteps that, but assures his reader that he will hold it in the same esteem even if it isn’t Word.

Moreover, there is no second work more beneficial, useful, and competent that is precise with regard to the place, time, situation, and people of in this Snow Land than this [Four Treatises]. For that reason, it is not allowable to depend on mere disputes about terms, which destroy the fruit. Considering this in itself as good meaning, we need to hold it very dear.”¹⁵⁹

The confluence of climatic and cultural specificity that the Four Treatises achieves is unparalleled. Therefore Zurkharwa sagely recommends avoiding superficial disputes, which will obscure what is really important about the work: its medical knowledge. That is what needs to be protected, not a mere taxonomical question of whether the text is actually Buddha Word.

Zurkharwa’s presentation is impeccable in his history of medicine: cautious, specific, critical, and yet generous. It is hard to see how the Desi could have been so enraged by it. Perhaps Zurkharwa was worried about the repercussions of coming out too clearly with his true opinion in his most visible compositions, his commentary and his history.¹⁶⁰

SHINING A LIGHT ON THE DARKNESS

It is telling that Zurkharwa worked out his most frank assessment of the Buddha Word debate in a short free-standing essay devoted to the question. Here he revisits many of the same arguments he had already broached in his longer works, but in a far more candid and ultimately risky manner. A Lamp to Dispel Darkness was written close to the end of his life, when he was sixty-four, in 1572.¹⁶¹ I have not been able to determine whether it ever was carved for blockprint reproduction. It is probably safe to say that it was distributed on a smaller and more selective scale than his substantial commentary and history. And yet it appears that, a century later, the Desi did read it.

Zurkharwa does little beating around the bush in this brief work. He jumps right into the fray after the quip that opened this chapter, about how the Four Treatises was the hot topic of the day:

All some do is insist that it is really Word. Some say it is really śāstra. But if one doesn’t connect with authoritative sources or reason, this is only insisting. Therefore, for the benefit of my own students, I will expound a discourse that is connected with authoritative sources and reason, such that if scholars see it, it will be easy to understand, and easy to explain to the common people—a discourse that aspires to be definitive.162

Zurkharwa is still taking pains to paint himself as judicious. Even though he is going to argue that the Four Treatises is a śāstra, he is not the kind who just insists without reasons.

That said, he immediately comes out with his most radical claim, one of the main statements that roused the Desi’s ire:¹⁶³ “Here there are three ways to explain: explaining [the Four Treatises] from the outer perspective as Buddha Word; explaining it from the inner perspective as a pandit’s śāstra; explaining it from the secret perspective as a Tibetan śāstra.”¹⁶⁴

This is very explicit. The outer/inner/secret taxonomy is common in the Tibetan literary world. Everyone would know that the secret is the truest account of the three. And so in truth, Zurkharwa says, the Four Treatises is a Tibetan composition.¹⁶⁵ But this is quite an exceptional way to say it. Zurkharwa has turned on its head the standard progression, which in religious writing inevitably moves from the “outer” exoteric level to the more internal and esoteric, spiritualized versions of something.¹⁶⁶ Here, he has the outer version posit a buddha as expositor of the Four Treatises, whereas the secret truth represents the prosaic view of an empirical, historical, and human composition. This stunning reversal is emblematic of the deep difference between the medical mentality that Zurkharwa is helping create and the assumptions at the center of Tibetan Buddhist doxography.

As Zurkharwa proceeds, he softens his statement a bit. For example, he makes the same point as in his history of medicine, about meaning and function being more important than who actually taught something.167 He further recaps his argument in Ancestors’ Advice on Tanaduk. But when he repeats his citation of the Abhidharma text that mentions a medicine forest where the Buddha stayed for four years, adding more detail on its location near the famous Deer Park in India, it is clearer what he is doing.¹⁶⁸ We were right to suggest above that he was simply working through the presumptions of the Four Treatises’ narrative on its own terms, for here he only presents this point in the context of the outer view, which for him is the least accurate. Nonetheless, on that view, if the Four Treatises is to be Buddha Word, then the place where the text was preached ought to be identified according to the authoritative source he has located. He adds the further proposition that while the Tanaduk mountain still is there, the city and also the preacher sage and audience were all just manifestations and now have disappeared. Admittedly, this would grant some empirical location to Tanaduk in the past, i.e., during the life of the Buddha, and it is not consistent with what Zurkharwa says elsewhere.¹⁶⁹ But again, this is only the outer view—not the one where Zurkharwa will plant his flag.

Zurkharwa’s treatment of the inner view is brief; he is not interested in the position that the work could be a pandit’s śāstra. He only gives a brief review of kinds of śāstra and then a few lines on who might be the Four Treatises author on this view. The possibilities range from Padmasambhava and Candranandana to a variety of Tibetans. Zurkharwa dismisses them all, insisting that such positions only serve to advance their proponents’ desires.¹⁷⁰

Zurkharwa’s use of categories is telling for the secret view that the Four Treatises is a Tibetan śāstra. He divides his discussion into citations of other scholars and explanations of their essence. Elsewhere Zurkharwa usually divides his discussion into the views of others that he will refute, and then his own view, which he will advance. But here the views of others are in accord with his own.¹⁷¹ He still seems to want to shore up his position by reminding the reader of others who have made the same radical point that the Four Treatises is the composition of a Tibetan. Then he ventures just who this Tibetan person would be, and introduces the figure of Yutok. But even when he finally gets down to the actual secret position toward which he’s been building, he opens with one more acknowledgment of the reasonable concerns of his opponents: “Might it not be the case that there is a problem [with your position], given the way that the Four Treatises sets up as its foundation that it is the Word of the Buddha? Well, this is what should be explained.”¹⁷²

Here is his clincher in response to his own rhetorical question: “If it were not made to be as if it were Buddha Word, then Tibet’s scholars, dolts, and everyone in between would all have a hard time trusting it.”173 This is an astounding salvo, not seen previously.¹⁷⁴ It bespeaks a critical distance uncommon in his time and place. He characterizes the people of Tibet, learned and ignorant alike, as having a certain predilection that must be taken into account by any author who wants his writing to be taken seriously. Tibetans want everything authoritative to be the Word of the Buddha.

Zurkharwa’s statement implies that the Four Treatises’ status as Buddha Word is a fiction, deliberate and calculated: “For those who don’t investigate the meaning and only worry about terms, if it were not made to be as if it were Word, it would not be acceptable.” Perhaps this serves to justify Zurkharwa’s own foregoing attempt to make it all work, as Word, for just such people who don’t investigate the meaning.

Zurkharwa evinces knowledge of the various arguments rejected by Tashi Pelzang about the obvious Tibetanness of the Four Treatises and in contrast, finds them convincing: “Moreover, the references to tea and pottery and the tradition of black divination in the context of checking pulse and urine, and the sounding of the voice of the cuckoo, etc., make it very clear that this is a Tibetan śāstra.” This leads him to the following magisterial interpretation about the grounds for Yutok’s fabrication, as he finally ties up his argument. “Moreover, regarding its being set up to be like Word, you need to know this way of explaining.”

When Zurkharwa says “like” Buddha Word, he means that the Four Treatises is not in fact Buddha Word. He continues,

You need to explain from the perspective of the foundational idea, necessity, and what will disprove its reality.¹⁷⁵ So, the foundational idea for it to be made as if it is Word is that the strength of the sun and moon at Yutok Yönten Gönpo’s birthplace has excellent efficacy for both hot and cold [plants]. ¹⁷⁶

Although stated briefly and elliptically, there is an unmistakable point here that is his lynchpin for understanding the Four Treatises’ entire basic setting, including the location of the text’s putative preaching over which scholars had been puzzling for so long. It also resolves everything Zurkharwa has been implying in his other writings by insisting that Tanaduk is not a real place in the world.

Although Zurkharwa does not say more than the lines just translated, a fuller statement of the very same point was made by a contemporary who might well have been a colleague, the great historian Pawo Tsuklak Trengwa (1504–66?).177 The historian is in the midst of telling the life story of Yutok. He is actually quoting someone else, one Jé Trinlé Zhap.¹⁷⁸

To the east of where he lived were mountain meadows with many blue medicines growing that were similar to Mount Gandhamādana.¹⁷⁹ And to the south grew hot blue medicines, and to the north there were snow mountains and cold medicines growing and to the west there was a forest, etc. The parts are all in accordance [with the description of the four mountains around Tanaduk in the Four Treatises]. And so he styled his own place of residence the medical city Tanaduk.

Tanaduk is really an exuberant rendition that Yutok “styled” based on an actual mountainous area around his home.¹⁸⁰ While Trinlé Zhap represents the more conventional understanding of Tanaduk as a city surrounded by four mountains, he otherwise is making a very similar point to what Zurkharwa intimated. If we have the right identification of Trinlé Zhap, it seems already to have been suggested a century before Zurkharwa and Tsuklak Trengwa. And this domestication of the Four Treatises’ basic setting would reach greater specificity yet, a century after the Desi, with another great critical medical mind, Lingmen Tashi (b. 1726), a close student of the polymath Situ Panchen Chökyi Jungné at the outlying medical center at Pelpung in eastern Tibet. The lengths to which he would go in the demystification of Tanaduk are exceptional. Lingmen states that Yutok’s conception of Tanaduk had to do with his way of perceiving the market town of Gurmo in Tsang.¹⁸¹ Here, rather than the old Buddhist idea of manifestation, we have a psychologized notion of a kind of euphemistic projection. Or perhaps in light of the reference to “styling” or “making,” we might say a literary flourish, or a kind of magical realism.

If Zurkharwa and colleagues’ reading of the true identity of Tanaduk were not enough to bring down the entire edifice of the Four Treatises’ pretensions, a second point made by Zurkharwa is even more bold. It starts with a claim that goes with the first. Just as the place where the work was taught is really Yutok’s hometown, the main actors are actually Yutok himself and his student Sumtön. Zurkharwa writes,

As is set up in the Rnam thar bka’ rgya ma, “The Lama is the real Intelligent Gnosis. I myself am Mind-Born, I think.” Just as that says, [the Four Treatises] is set it up such that Yutok himself is Intelligent Gnosis and Sumtön Yeshé Zung is Mind-Born.¹⁸²

We ourselves already noticed a similar statement to the lines Zurkharwa is quoting here in the Crucial Lineage Biography; it is another sign of our confluence of historical method.183 But while in the early source such an exalted claim about both his master and Sumtön himself fit seamlessly into the rest of the self-enhancing tenor, Zurkharwa puts it to a different use. The very claim of enlightened authorship, so common in the Treasure tradition, becomes here the very proof that it is really just the fanciful imagination of the real-life author. When Sumtön claims that his master is Intelligent Gnosis and he himself is Mind-Born, he thinks, this shows Zurkharwa and his critically minded compatriots not the true spiritualized identity of the two Tibetan physicians but rather, and more simply, that they set up (bkod pa) the work in such a way that they would figure thusly in the Four Treatises.

Once again we can turn to Pawo Tsuklak Trengwa’s quote from Trinlé Zhap, for it articulates this second point of Zurkharwa’s more specifically. It also breaks apart the very process of visionary inspiration and authorship in a way rarely seen in Tibetan scholastic writing.

And he styled the heart realm of reality as the Buddha Bhaiṣajyaguru, the variety of conceptions as the four kinds of retinue, the thought that desires to compose as Sage Mind-Born, and basic intelligence as Sage Intelligent Gnosis. And then he expounded the Four Treatises.¹⁸⁴

Here Trinlé Zhap recaps all the main elements of the basic setting and associates each with one of the cognitive processes involved in writing. That the basic ground of such writing is equated with the exalted, enlightened state of the “heart realm of reality”¹⁸⁵ fits with the ongoing high respect for Yutok, even from the most critical commentator, and the repeated use of the label “manifestation” or “manifested body” to refer to him.¹⁸⁶ Accordingly, Yutok’s basic inspiration for composition is, quite appropriately, figured as the Medicine Buddha. The issues to which the urge to write is responding are personified as the audience of the work—the gods, sages, Buddhists, and tīrthikas. The basic urge to write, i.e., the pretext, is the interlocutor. The intelligence that creates the teaching is Sage Intelligent Gnosis. It’s all Yutok, though, working with his student: that’s the point.

Tsuklak Trengwa continues with his own comment. There is nothing terribly transgressive in Yutok presenting both an ordinary appearance and then a pure appearance for disciples. Indeed, the trope of the great teacher who has various aspects depending on who is looking is nothing new in Tibet. Speaking for himself now, Tsuklak Trengwa avers:

For that ordinary appearance to be a pure appearance for students in the way it is explained in the basic setting—I think this is not a transgression. Moreover, if you were to ask if crafting the basic setting as if it were Buddha Word is wrong, [I would reply that] it is a great marvel that [the Four Treatises], having been blessed by the power of the Buddha, shone forth spontaneously in the heart of this manifested body.

Tsuklak Trengwa is very comfortable with inspired writing. And note, by the way, that neither he nor the others arguing against the Word thesis are noticing the possible implications of calling Yutok a manifested body. That is not read as rendering Yutok a buddha or his writing Buddha Word. Perhaps this shows how generalized the tulku label (i.e., sprul sku, lit., manifestation body) for reincarnated masters had already become in Tibet: it was a sign of great esteem, but it need not imply that everything such a master wrote was Buddha Word in the strict sense of belonging in the canon of the Buddha’s teachings. The same applies to Tsuklak Trengwa’s invocation of the “blessings” of the Buddha. That too can have a general meaning without necessarily taking on the technical connotation associated with kinds of Buddha Word.

Tsuklak Trengwa goes on to summarize the various views of those who believe the Four Treatises to be Word, but then points out that even though many do believe this, the two diagnostic methods of pulse and urine found in the Four Treatises are distinctively suited for the time and place of Tibet. This brings him to the same move that Zurkharwa made, to finally blur the whole issue away:

Examination of the definite feeling of symptomatic pulse and looking at urine is not in other works, and therefore there is no better medical work in the world than the Four Treatises. In particular, the kindness of its suitability to the place and time of Tibet has no comparison. Therefore I raise it to my crown as if it were Buddha Word.187

The “as if” phrase stands out again. Really it is hardly noticeable; the sentence could almost be read to say “I raise the Buddha Word Four Treatises to my crown.” Medicine could almost be Buddhism. But when scholars like Tsuklak Trengwa and Zurkharwa assure their readers that the work is as good as Buddha Word, they are making an important move that has two inseparable but importantly distinguishable parts. They have subtly concluded that the Four Treatises is not Buddha Word and is rather the composition of a Tibetan scholar, but that does not matter. That means there is a more important issue at stake: the value of the work, its practical virtues qua medical textbook. This issue emerges precisely by virtue of relativizing the Buddhist dispensation. Let us recall at this juncture the vantage point and cosmopolitanism in the Desi’s medical paintings, whereby illustrating the medical classification of knowledge relativized religious practices and symbols. Already, a century earlier, the mentality percolating in Tibetan medicine was facilitating such moves to higher epistemic ground.

Zurkharwa concludes A Lamp to Dispel Darkness by returning to the other two categories that he had said were needed to explain how the Four Treatises were constructed as Buddha Word, beyond the “foundational idea” just reviewed. The second, “necessity,” is quickly dispensed with, but it underscores Zurkharwa’s position. The work had to be Buddha Word “so as to lead along those people who are hard to satisfy.” And the third, “what will disprove its reality,” is what he already showed in Ancestors’ Advice. The mountains named in the Four Treatises are not the real ones. Rather, the names are based on the equivalent strength and quality of the mountains in the vicinity where the author was writing. This is what “doctors of today” need to know, Zurkharwa concludes. These current-day physicians have not trusted the scholars who have it right, and their mindset has been under the power of “old habits.”188 Such doctors don’t understand the point of the work and can’t distinguish what is from what is not.¹⁸⁹

There is again a modern sentiment in this. In fact, Zurkharwa thematizes a difference between past and present knowledge on several occasions. While to be sure, he sometimes participates in the usual rhetoric bemoaning the fallen state of current medical scholarship (that is, other than his own), he also frequently berates a general category of “scholars from the past” and insists that the current generation can do better.190 This seeming lapse of etiquette is one of the reasons the Desi purported to be so upset with him. I pointed out in chapter 2 that it is hardly the case that Tibetan Buddhist scholars never criticize the views of their predecessors, for they do; what’s more, the Desi himself broke with tradition far more significantly by launching ad hominem attacks on his living teachers. Of course, for both men much of the bravado can be read simply as an effort to distinguish their own knowledge as superior. Still, alluding to a generic category of previous knowledge and old habits does take a step beyond the more conventional practice of critiquing a particular view of a particular scholar from the past. Zurkharwa sometimes is talking about an inferior pastness as such, and that stands in sharp tension with the prevailing Tibetan Buddhist rhetoric about how the present is a degenerate time, a fall from a prior golden age.¹⁹¹ His characterization of medical knowledge’s problems in temporal terms and accompanying urge to get medicine up to speed in the present is unusual and worth noting. It is one more aspect of the distinctive mentality that his self-positioning suggests.

In sum, there are several distinctive things to notice in the medical Buddha Word debate. There had certainly been debates about the provenance of a purported Buddhist scripture before, and whether it was indeed originally from India. But the critical wing of the medical debate pursued this question on empirical grounds regarding climate, culture, and time period, rarely invoked elsewhere. There are also questions about the reality of place in other Tibetan literary contexts, as well as early attempts to describe the world in geopolitical terms, but few in which historicist arguments grounded such discussions.¹⁹² One outstanding exception, an early and seemingly realist appeal to the empirical qualities of place, is in the virulent critique leveled by Sakya Paṇḍita at attempts to locate Indian sacred geography in Tibet, studied by Toni Huber.¹⁹³ Motivated by a quite different concern, i.e., the threat to monastic control of tantric practice represented by pilgrimage cults, Sapan warns his readers to distinguish factual descriptions of places from poetic characterizations of their attributes, anticipating some of Zurkharwa’s logic.¹⁹⁴ But perhaps because of the difference in motive, Sapan’s argument ends up mostly avoiding the more basic question of the status of these places as such. As long as there is no argument about their location in Tibet, he seems to have been satisfied. In so doing he seems to have laid his argument open to the vociferous response over the centuries, a robust assertion of these places’ location in Tibet after all, based in large part on a hermeneutical argument about kinds and levels of perception that essentially make any appeal to empirical evidence moot.

The turn to a hermeneutics of perception, which shifts attention from the reality of a place to the qualities of the perceiver, is seen elsewhere in the history of Tibetan religion too. John Newman reports on a transformation in the conception of the mythical land of Shambhala in Kālacakra tradition, and here the difference from the way that Zurkharwa handles the Tanaduk issue is telling.195 An early travel guide to Shambhala from the thirteenth century represented the route as passing through commonly known towns and geographical areas, but there is a gradual spiritualization of the journey in subsequent descriptions. By the eighteenth century Newman finds in Panchen Lozang Pelden Yeshé’s guidebook, written two centuries after Zurkharwa lived, an awareness of a clash between this imagined place and modern knowledge of geography. Newman shows that Pelden Yeshé opted to render the journey in spiritual terms in order to “protect the sacred utopia with a veil of ritual magic.”¹⁹⁶

We might think that this is of a piece with Zurkharwa’s insistence that Tanaduk should be moved out of the domain of everyday reality, but the idea is really very different. In Zurkharwa’s case the urge is not to lift the Four Treatises to ever higher levels by making Tanaduk a manifested, magically created place. Rather, his approach serves to keep the mythical confined to its own domain, that of the “outer view,” which for him represents the common expectations of average Tibetans who need such a fiction. This frees up medical historiography for the real business at hand, which is to determine the historical circumstances around the writing of the Four Treatises. Such a strategy to clear the space for something more scientific will be even more apparent in his handling of the channels in the body, to be studied in the next chapter.

Questions about the authorship of a purported Buddhist scripture are also well known in the Buddhist Treasure tradition, but again the differences from the medical debate should be noted. Whereas in the Treasure tradition the critique came from the outside, i.e., from those bent on delegitimizing works that are not really Buddha Word, in the medical case the skepticism comes equally from within. Critiques like Zurkharwa’s were not at all about trying to bring the Four Treatises down. Rather, they are about trying to get the story right. And when it turns out that what is right is that the work has human and historically locatable authorship, it does not mean that the work is any less authoritative. No, the author’s knowledge was based on real study and eclectic research, and if Yutok’s basic inspiration was lifted up rhetorically to make him indeed inspired by the Buddha, that is not a problem. The conceit is well motivated, understood as a fortuitous idiom to fit reigning conceptions of authoritative knowledge.

Such recognition of—and, once it has been duly noted, comfort with—mythologization and artifice is ironically part of the scientific mentality these scholars were helping to foster. It did not undermine their strict attention to empirical matters in other domains, i.e., in the medically relevant material itself. But it might indeed have been part of the double strategy in which scholars like Zurkharwa were invested, to protect against the protests of more conservative colleagues who were endeavoring to maintain medicine’s Buddhist identity, while preserving a space apart for the development of medical knowledge as such. Even the exceptional subversion of the usual outer, inner, and secret heuristic in Zurkharwa’s final essay, whereby the secret or highest truth is that which is most down to earth, can be read in this pragmatic sense. Beyond making clear that the Buddha’s authorship is only the outer version of the origin story, that which the common man would hear, there is probably something quite strategic in making the real truth “secret”—not in the esoteric sense but with the very straightforward purpose of keeping such a controversial view under the radar screen.

The next chapter will follow another debate in which Zurkharwa completes the circle. Once again we will appreciate the vulnerability of the empirically based critique of religious truths and see even more caution and deftness from Zurkharwa. Once again too we will see him cordoning off a spiritualized, more salvific dimension of the matter at hand, acknowledging its importance, but making room thereby for another set of standards that are subject to ordinary sensory inspection. The turf will shift a bit, however. Zurkharwa still wants to keep alive a religious vision of the body’s channels for salvific purposes, making for a much more ambivalent and delicate negotiation. The stakes for medicine are higher too. Now the issue of accuracy concerns the very anatomical map upon which the physician must depend in order to practice his craft.